The Washington editor of the New York Times serves up this thorough, generous analysis of the life and political career of the senior Senator from Massachusetts. Clymer begins this, his first book, by describing a November 1982 strategy session during which Kennedy decided—for the final time in his life—not to run for the presidency. Clymer then returns to 1932 (the year Kennedy was born) and proceeds in stout but unremarkable prose to explore one of the most remarkable lives in American political history. Clymer contends that the Senator’s political enemies (mostly on the right) have fashioned a grossly misrepresentative comic-pathetic Kennedy-caricature: an overweight, besotted, tongue-tied, tax-and-spend libidinous liberal. To support his thesis that Kennedy is not only “the leading Senator of his time” but “one of the greats” in the history of the Senate, Clymer describes with painstaking fidelity the Senator’s devotion to those causes most closely associated not only with him but also with his slain older brothers: health care, voting rights, education, women’s rights, hunger, and poverty. No fair-minded person who reads these pages can deny the sincerity of Kennedy’s commitments to the underprivileged or the facility he displays in the Senate. Clymer neither ignores nor wallows in the sordid aspects of Kennedy’s life. In his Chappaquiddick chapter, for example, Clymer provides in full the statement Kennedy gave to the police (with all of its vile equivocations), but he concludes that there is “no reason to doubt” the claim that he repeatedly tried to rescue Mary Jo Kopechne from his submerged vehicle. Similarly, Clymer chides Kennedy for the reckless behavior that ultimately led to the 1991 rape case against his nephew William Kennedy Smith, a case that severely diminished the Senator’s moral authority—and virtually silenced him—during the subsequent Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill controversy. Well-researched and -documented (Clymer conducted over 400 interviews, including 21 with the Senator), Clymer’s biography provides a hefty counterweight to the many strident distortions of the Senator’s life. (16 pages photos, not seen) (First serial to Time magazine; author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-688-14285-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1999
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
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