History Today columnist Stanley (Kennedy vs. Carter: The 1980 Battle for the Democratic Party’s Soul, 2010) treats the paleoconservative and “culture warrior” to a sympathetic close-up and finds he’s a hard guy to dislike—even if we have him to thank for Sarah Palin.
Buchanan has been on the American political scene for decades. This crisp narrative goes all the way back to the beginning on the streets of Georgetown where he learned the importance of quick hands and unwavering loyalty. Both attributes would serve him well throughout his stormy life as a political pundit, advisor to two presidents and three-time presidential contender. Stanley tracks these events with a professional level of scrutiny that is rarely unflattering, but never quite fawning. We learn that Buchanan stokes the fire in his belly with a burning desire to return America to a sanitized version of itself, a time when same-sex couples were criminals and every nice white family had a black maid all its own. And so what if he understood AIDS as “nature’s retribution” and once referred to Hitler as a “man of courage.” He’s also sharp, witty and talented. Even liberal commentator Rachel Maddow, we learn, reserves a begrudging affection for the guy. These confounding complexities are so delightfully examined that the last third of the book proves to be something of a disappointment, as the biographical thread almost gets lost in tangential analyses of dusty opponents like Bob Dole, Lamar Alexander and George H.W. Bush. Stanley gives only cursory attention to Buchanan’s TV career as a ubiquitous talking head. The takeaway is that while he has been consigned as an “also-ran,” Buchanan has undoubtedly been successful in at least one thing: elevating group biases to the level of “cultural issues” and thereby making possible the ascent of the Tea Party and similar groups.
An engrossing look inside an ultra-conservative mind.
Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-58174-9
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 17, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
