Tight, polished and effectively focused on the lesser-known end of Churchill’s career.
Accomplished biographer Leaming (Jack Kennedy: The Education of a Statesman, 2006, etc.) tracks Winston Churchill’s masterful postwar comeback.
Voted from power just as he was implementing the Allied peace terms at Potsdam and warning of Soviet expansion in Eastern Europe, Churchill was blindsided but determined to continue to lead his Conservative party. The author provides a lively chronicle of his incremental rehabilitation. Churchill’s career might have been heretofore defined by “unsquashable resilience,” but he was “absorbed by the idea that a comeback was impossible.” His warning of pernicious goings-on behind “the iron curtain” was out of sync with the popular mood of triumphant celebration in August 1945. Yet despite being in his 70s and having suffered several strokes, he spent the next five years speechifying, preparing his memoirs, painting and traveling. He refused to retire, believing that he still had a mission to accomplish. Moreover, he maintained that his heir apparent, Anthony Eden, was not ready to inherit the mantle. As Truman and the West were catching on to the Soviet threat, Churchill redoubled his “usual blood-and-thunder anti-socialism” message. He used the occasion of the publication of The Gathering Storm (1947) to remind readers of his initial warnings to the Allies about allowing the Russians to take Berlin first, a decision defended vehemently by Eisenhower his memoir published the same year, Crusade in Europe. The Conservatives were voted back in by October 1951, and Churchill immediately pushed for a summit with Stalin but was put off by the American presidential election. Stalin’s subsequent death, Eden’s ill health, Churchill’s own faltering strength and the necessity of negotiating the atomic debates and Indo-China machinations led to final debilitation, and he was squeezed out shortly after his 80th birthday. Using a variety of material, Leaming executes a smooth, succinct narrative.
Tight, polished and effectively focused on the lesser-known end of Churchill’s career.Pub Date: Oct. 12, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-133758-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2010
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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