For a picture of strict belief in class distinctions and the stupidity of the fools who accede to the good of the whole,...
As the great-nephew of the first president, Washington writes about a forgotten book he claims molded the Founding Father’s personality: H. de Luzancy’s A Panegyrick to the Memory of His Grace Frederick, Late Duke of Schonberg (1690).
The author deems it absolutely necessary that all Americans change their ways and become more like his great-uncle, ignoring the passage of more than 200 years of social, political and economic changes that have altered the need and/or usefulness of such a person. He does acknowledge modernity with comparisons that suit no purpose and make no point. This book seems to be Washington’s bully pulpit (his conclusion: “If you trust in Providence, follow your conscience, and keep an eye on the past to guide you,” he writes, “while you keep another eye on your goals, then you, too, can be good and great, just like George Washington”), and the narrative is loaded with witless asides and lazy writing (“What. A. Cool. Job.”; “I mean, it’s not for everyone, maybe, but, hey…”; “Hold on to your tri-cornered hats”) without which readers could possibly take him seriously. At the end of the book, the author briefly mentions that next to the Bible on Washington’s bedside was Addison’s Cato, which was staged at Valley Forge and from which he quoted as early as 1758. Cato, the virtuous republican who opposed Caesar’s tyranny, undoubtedly had a great deal more influence on the general than did Duke Frederick. This book is much more a venue for the author’s ultraconservative views—e.g., “stupid, bacon-loving Canadians”; “haughty contempt…a French specialty”; and especially, “the ignorant, stupid people who believe [in] the rule of Demos, the Mob.”
For a picture of strict belief in class distinctions and the stupidity of the fools who accede to the good of the whole, please step this way. For anyone else, take a pass.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62157-205-3
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Regnery History
Review Posted Online: Nov. 25, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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
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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