Much energy is expended here demonstrating that Ronald Reagan's policy toward the Soviets was pro- rather than reactive beginning in 1984. According to Fischer (Political Science/Univ. of Toronto), both versions of the ``conventional wisdom'' about the ending of the Cold War portray Reagan as simply responding to Gorbachev's initiatives. Liberals dismiss him as the lucky man in office when the Soviet Union unraveled, conservatives praise him as the hardliner tightening the screws until the Soviets cried ``uncle.'' Fischer's examination of events, however, points to a stark shift in Reagan administration rhetoric and policy prior to the 1985 summit with Gorbachev. The references to an evil empire and refusals to enter into serious arms negotiations were abruptly replaced by a more conciliatory attitude shorn of saber-rattling and positively seeking accommodation with the Soviets. But if the Reagan Administration was out front rather than reacting to Gorbachev, the interesting question is explaining this reversal. In good dissertation-like fashion, three hypotheses are considered: (1) domestic politics dictated a softening of ideological hyperbole prior to the 1984 election; (2) moderates within the administration became more influential in the area of foreign policy; and (3) Reagan himself decided to take relations with the Soviets in a new direction. The possibility that multiple factors were at work is ignored, and the first two potential explanations are rejected as insufficient. The third is supported through a quasi-psychological analysis in which Reagan's horror of nuclear weapons, his belief in an approaching biblical Armageddon, and a series of triggering events are posited as the basis for his leadership in reaching out to the Soviets. There is no hard evidence supporting this hypothesis, of course, but it doesn't matter: This is a purely academic exercise, somewhat akin to arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8262-1138-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
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
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
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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