Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. will be read because he is Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. That much is assured. But beyond the name and the campus fame, there is the fact that this is a perfectly satisfactory book on a rather — by now — shopworn subject. Nothing here, understand, to set you on your political ear, but rather what we have come to expect from Professor Schlesinger: a vivid historical review of the development — no, alarming accretion — of presidential power. Of course George Reedy (and Schlesinger acknowledges the debt) has deftly explored this trend (viz. Twilight of the Presidency, 1970; and The Presidency in Flux, KR, p. 549) — Schlesinger even uses Reedy's operative adjective "monarchical" — and Emmet John Hughes in his recent The Living Presidency (KR, p. 667) more cautiously but very ably addressed the same issue, arguing that we must resist the present impulse — generated by the Nixonomical horrors of Watergate — for "reforming zeal" and live with the "abiding paradoxes" of the modern office. Schlesinger's contribution is his talent for organizing history — he conducts his inquiry with the surehandedness of a professional so at home with his material that we sometimes forget that a scholar is at work unscrambling the contradictory past. We saw it — this genius for putting together the lineaments of the historical record — in the Roosevelt volumes and here he is just as good. The overriding theme here concerns the presidency in the democratic system: can we permit the chief executive unlimited authority in the area of foreign affairs and war-making and remain a free nation, or must we sacrifice efficiency and speed of decision-making by sharing the power around, as the Constitution mandates? Schlesinger wants a "constitutional" presidency — a rather wobbly solution in these days of constitutional confrontation at the highest level. But withal, Schlesinger has seemingly effortlessly traced the rise of the autocratic White House and that is sufficient.
Pub Date: Nov. 19, 1973
ISBN: 0618420010
Page Count: 629
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1973
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Vintage McCullough and a book that students of American history will find captivating.
A lively history of the Ohio River region in the years between the Revolution and the Civil War.
McCullough (The American Spirit: Who We Are and What We Stand For, 2015, etc.) isn’t writing about the sodbusters and hardscrabblers of the Far West, the people whom the word “pioneers” evokes, but instead their predecessors of generations past who crossed the Appalachians and settled in the fertile country along and north of the Ohio River. Manasseh Cutler, one of his principal figures, “endowed with boundless intellectual curiosity,” anticipated the movement of his compatriots across the mountains well before the war had ended, advocating for the Northwest Ordinance to secure a region that, in McCullough’s words, “was designed to guarantee what would one day be known as the American way of life”—a place in which slavery was forbidden and public education and religious freedom would be emphasized. “Ohio fever” spread throughout a New England crippled, after the war, by economic depression, but Southerners also moved west, fomenting the conditions that would, at the end of McCullough’s vivid narrative, end in regional war three generations later. Characteristically, the author suggests major historical themes without ever arguing them as such. For example, he acknowledges the iniquities of the slave economy simply by contrasting the conditions along the Ohio between the backwaters of Kentucky and the sprightly city of Cincinnati, speaking through such figures as Charles Dickens. Indeed, his narrative abounds with well-recognized figures in American history—John Quincy Adams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Johnny Appleseed—while highlighting lesser-known players. His account of Aaron Burr—who conspired to overthrow the government of Mexico (and, later, his own country) after killing Alexander Hamilton, recruiting confederates in the Ohio River country—is alone worth the price of admission. There are many other fine moments, as well, including a brief account of the generosity that one farmer in Marietta, Ohio, showed to his starving neighbors and another charting the fortunes of the early Whigs in opposing the “anti-intellectual attitude of the Andrew Jackson administration.”
Vintage McCullough and a book that students of American history will find captivating.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6868-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2019
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
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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