A reasonably serious biography, by a reporter in Time magazine’s Washington bureau. Blackman, a seasoned journalist, focuses on the personal life of a public figure. Readers seeking analysis of Albright’s foreign policy, insights into how her mind works, or an agenda she might pursue through higher elective office will need to look elsewhere. Even political relations are characterized in terms of style rather than substance. Her interactions with the president, for example, are described as “almost flirtatious,” while any shared foreign policy goals beyond vague platitudes remain undiscussed. That said, this is a balanced, penetrating look at Albright as a person. Blackman acknowledges Albright’s considerable accomplishments without making her into a saint, exposing qualities that have helped her succeed but are not always positive. In Blackman’s hands, Albright appears driven and shrewd, talented and caring about others, and above all an expert networker at home in the image-conscious late 20th century. She has “great confidence” but also “abiding insecurities” requiring “constant reassurance” from friends, and is “more obsessed with her image than almost anyone on the public stage today.” Deeply shaken by her divorce, she turned to friends for comfort so excessively that they eventually told her “to shut up about Joe, to get on with her life.” This experience also suggests an Albright pattern of behavior: how could she have been married for 23 years and have no inkling that her spouse was about to leave, just as she apparently was ignorant of her Jewish heritage until a reporter uncovered it? The latter incident is thoroughly beaten to death by Blackman, who also devotes a full third of the book to the life of Albright’s father. This discussion of her family background is interesting on its own terms, but disproportionate if the goal is to understand the secretary of state. The first Albright biography worth reading, but not destined to be the definitive account of a political career. (Author tour; radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-84564-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1998
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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