Occasionally distracting footnotes aside, an admiring treatment of Kissinger and an intriguing examination of the fraught...
Inquisitive look at a year in the life of Henry Kissinger, who said, “I was the glue that held it together in 1973—and I’m not being boastful.”
After a landslide reelection for Richard Nixon and a U.S. foreign policy that seemed on the verge of peace with honor in Vietnam and an open dialogue with China, 1973 was eventually marked by the Yom Kippur War and Watergate. In addition to providing colorful portraits of the international figures that played Kissinger’s foils—Leonid Brezhnev, Golda Meir, Anwar Sadat—historian Horne (To Lose a Battle: France 1940, 2007, etc.) follows the statesman month by frantic month in his dealings with China, Vietnam, the Soviet Union, Chile, Europe and the Middle East. During the year in which Kissinger won a Nobel Prize and became Secretary of State, Nixon’s precipitous decline loomed over everything, which was vividly reflected during the Yom Kippur War. Horne grippingly recounts those tense days of international negotiation, all the more dramatic due to the psychological withdrawal of the president. The dynamic between Nixon and Kissinger, so different in personality and background, propels the narrative. The author writes perceptively of the strange bond between the two men—one marked by “a certain extraordinary insecurity” but also by a shared political vision and a conspiratorial secrecy. In a relationship that Kissinger characterized as “ambivalent, compounded of aloofness and respect, of distrust and admiration,” Horne provocatively wonders if “Nixon’s self-destruction…made Kissinger.”
Occasionally distracting footnotes aside, an admiring treatment of Kissinger and an intriguing examination of the fraught Nixon/Kissinger relationship.Pub Date: June 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7432-7283-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
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
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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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