A self-aggrandizing, self-righteous attempt by the blustery New York senator to explain his vision of the American political sceneat least as it applies to the life and times of Senator Alfonse D'Amato. The world according to New York's Republican senator is very simple. Just about every political move that D'Amato makes is correct. Just about every political move that his opponents make is incorrect. Virtually every politician who has run against him, D'Amato says, is wrong on nearly all the issues. Virtually all of his political opponentsincluding the late New York Republican senator Jacob Javits, former Democratic representative Elizabeth Holtzman, former Ralph Nader associate Mark Green, and former New York State attorney general Robert Abramsran unfair, viciously deceitful campaigns against him. D'Amato's black-and-white world also includes an enemies list made up primarily of the ``liberal establishment'' (also known as ``self-righteous liberal do- gooders'') along with the ``liberal press'' (also called ``the establishment press''). In the world according to Alfonse, the senator is always right; the press is disingenuous at best, dishonest at worst. The senator's press enemies list is topped by D'Amato's hometown newspaper, Newsday. That newspaper's coverage of his 1992 senatorial campaign, the senator says, was ``blatantly biased and hostile.'' D'Amato also has harshly critical things to say about Newsweek, the New York Timeswhich, he claims, ``goes to all sorts of lengths to appear sensitive to every `politically correct' group or lifestyle''the Village Voice, and CBS's Sixty Minutes. D'Amato credits Kevin McDonough with helping him ``compile'' his book. The senator, however, takes full author credit. That might explain why the writing is artless at best, mired in clichÇs, filled with amateurish exclamation points, and marred by several grammatical errors. For dyed-in-the-wool conservative Republican fans of Senator Alfonse D'Amato only. (16 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 18, 1995
ISBN: 0-7868-6045-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1995
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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