Solid and worthwhile.
A detailed account of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s Senate campaign, from an AP staff writer.
In 1998, when Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan announced his retirement plans, New Yorkers began to speculate as to who would replace him. As the race narrowed to First Lady Hillary Clinton and New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, many in the press corps thought a success for Clinton was unlikely: she had never held elective office or lived in New York, and she had just weathered eight years of White House scandals. But the press didn’t factor in Clinton’s appeal to liberals, women, and upstate voters; her “Listening Tour” visited all 62 counties, coverage that Giuliani and Rick Lazio (who won the Republican nomination after the mayor dropped out) didn’t come close to duplicating. Harpaz deftly chronicles the events surrounding the race. Even though she was campaigning for public office, Clinton remained elusive. Frustrated by the lack of media access (dubbed “avails”), the press corps never knew if the campaign’s stonewalling was due to security concerns, Clinton’s reserved disposition, or her general distrust of the media. Harpaz provides juicy details contrasting Clinton and Lazio: while the first lady’s foreign-policy vision, as presented to the Council on Foreign Relations, “cover[ed] everything from the Balkans to missile-defense technology to human rights to Israel,” Lazio “referred to the president of North Korea as ‘Kim Jong the Second’ instead of ‘Kim Jong Il.’ ” Some of the first lady’s initial comments betrayed her carpetbagger status, but by the end of the race “she ended up an expert on everything from treating asthma in the Bronx to getting high-speed Internet access in Buffalo.” And Harpaz’s chronicle of a mostly female press corps covering the first woman ever to hold statewide office in New York makes for exhilarating reading.
Solid and worthwhile.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2001
ISBN: 0-312-28126-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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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