An interesting study filled with useful historical context.
A British historian fascinated with the American South examines the changes in the region through the political career of Albert Gore Sr. (1907-1998).
Badger (American History/Northumbria Univ.; FDR: The First Hundred Days, 2008, etc.) offers a great deal of information about the U.S. senator from Tennessee—and father of former vice president Al Gore Jr.—but this book is not primarily a biography. Understanding what the author hopes to accomplish requires understanding that the book is part of the publisher’s series called Politics and Culture in Modern America. The mission statement of that series includes the desire to “reverse the fragmentation of modern U.S. history” regarding a variety of issues, including the role of government; racial, gender, and labor controversies; and widespread social movements. In that context, Badger succeeds admirably. As a Tennessee House member and then senator, Gore sought to modernize the Deep South by building interstate highways, encouraging the use of higher-tech agricultural equipment and strategies, and supporting the Tennessee Valley Authority’s distribution of electricity. Regarding racial segregation, Gore represented progress, albeit uncomfortable and slow progress. Knowing the nation needed the participation of black voters, Gore advocated from a distance while hoping to retain the votes of avid segregationists throughout Tennessee. On other matters, he openly defied constituents by opposing American involvement in the Vietnam War and insisting on the constitutional separation of church and state. Gore also demonstrated political courage by sometimes opposing the policies of fellow Southerner and Senate colleague Lyndon Johnson, especially after Johnson became president. Gore’s refusal to surrender his semi-maverick status led to his defeat in 1970 to a Republican candidate who supported a return to open segregation. In an epilogue, Badger comments on Gore’s post-Senate career in multinational business and law practice as well as his work campaigning for his son.
An interesting study filled with useful historical context.Pub Date: Dec. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8122-5072-5
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Univ. of Pennsylvania
Review Posted Online: Sept. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2018
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.
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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