Despite the calendar slog, the authors make a compelling, tacit parallel to today’s running threats by extremist groups.
In a chronological, episodic narrative that grows somewhat tedious yet chilling, Minutaglio (City on Fire: The Explosion That Devastated a Texas Town and Ignited a Historic Legal Battle, 2004, etc.) and Davis (J. Frank Dobie, 2009, etc.) unearth the various fringe elements rampant in Dallas in the three years (from January 1960 to November 1963) preceding John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
These anti-communist and racist groups were essentially sanctioned by officials and created a dangerous climate for the president and first lady during their visit on November 22, 1963. Indeed, Kennedy had been warned not to come, especially after the violent reception of U.N. ambassador Adlai Stevenson by Dallas crowds several weeks before. “Super-patriots” like Gen. Edwin A. Walker, formerly enlisted by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in helping integrate Little Rock Central High School, had made an about-face and grown stridently pro-segregationist, distributing Wanted for Treason posters at the time of JFK’s visit; billionaire oilman H.L. Hunt was bankrolling right-wing groups; Frank McGehee was organizing a National Indignation Convention; and publisher Ted Dealey, whose paper the Dallas Morning News routinely attacked the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, ran an incendiary full-page advertisement from Bernard Weissman’s American Fact-Finding Mission on the day Kennedy arrived in Dallas. In this xenophobic, anti-liberal, anti–East Coast atmosphere, Lee Harvey Oswald purchased a mail-order rifle, which he tried out first by shooting at Gen. Walker through a window of his home. Minutaglio and Davis alternate their doomsday scenario with chronicles of the upbeat attempts at integrating and liberalizing Dallas—e.g., international marketing efforts by showman Stanley Marcus (of Neiman Marcus) and New Hope Baptist Church pastor H. Rhett James’ engineering of Martin Luther King Jr.’s visit to the city.
Despite the calendar slog, the authors make a compelling, tacit parallel to today’s running threats by extremist groups.Pub Date: Oct. 8, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4555-2209-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A...
Valediction from the late neurologist and writer Sacks (On the Move: A Life, 2015, etc.).
In this set of four short essays, much-forwarded opinion pieces from the New York Times, the author ponders illness, specifically the metastatic cancer that spread from eye to liver and in doing so foreclosed any possibility of treatment. His brief reflections on that unfortunate development give way to, yes, gratitude as he examines the good things that he has experienced over what, in the end, turned out to be a rather long life after all, lasting 82 years. To be sure, Sacks has regrets about leaving the world, not least of them not being around to see “a thousand…breakthroughs in the physical and biological sciences,” as well as the night sky sprinkled with stars and the yellow legal pads on which he worked sprinkled with words. Sacks works a few familiar tropes and elaborates others. Charmingly, he reflects on his habit since childhood of associating each year of his life with the element of corresponding atomic weight on the periodic table; given polonium’s “intense, murderous radioactivity,” then perhaps 84 isn’t all that it’s cut out to be. There are some glaring repetitions here, unfortunate given the intense brevity of this book, such as his twice citing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s call to revel in “intercourse with the world”—no, not that kind. Yet his thoughts overall—while not as soul-stirringly inspirational as the similar reflections of Randy Pausch or as bent on chasing down the story as Christopher Hitchens’ last book—are shaped into an austere beauty, as when Sacks writes of being able in his final moments to “see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts.”
If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A fitting, lovely farewell.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-451-49293-7
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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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