Here’s how the sausage is made on Capitol Hill—and in Franken’s case, made with a smile.
The nation’s funniest senator speaks of the strange ways of government by “old white men.”
Franken, the Democratic senator from Minnesota and survivor of the early years of Saturday Night Live, is a definitively humorous fellow and about as candid as any politician can be expected to be. As he opens this memoir/user’s manual, he recounts that he is asked from time to time whether holding a seat in the Senate is as much fun as having been on SNL back in the glory days, to which his response is, “why would it be?” Why, indeed? He finds that his stock is increased among his Republican counterparts, however, when they learn that he knew Broderick Crawford, the tough hero of the classic law-and-order TV series Highway Patrol—proving, he says, precisely the oldness and whiteness of the legislative body, and mostly for the worse. Along the way, Franken is open about discussing his wife’s alcoholism and the effect it had on his first run for the Senate; far from being a liability, voters appreciated both the humanity and humility of their openness about the problem and Franken’s loyalty alike. The same problem was more insidious with the author’s erstwhile comedy partner Tom Davis; suffice it to say, as Franken does, that his reaction to the addiction “had made me a much less pleasant person to be around.” If anything, the author comes off as affable without being overly yielding, friendly but ready to scrap, and an unabashed devotee of the “Hillary Model”: “Be a workhorse, not a showhorse. Go to all your hearings. Come early, stay late. Do your homework. Don’t do national press. Be accessible to your state media and to your constituents.” And though he allows that Republicans “are just awful,” he also holds that Democrats have to accommodate the fact that they exist and try to get things done with them—all except maybe Ted Cruz.
Here’s how the sausage is made on Capitol Hill—and in Franken’s case, made with a smile.Pub Date: May 30, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5387-5998-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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.
Atlanticsenior 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
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