A lively and refreshing memoir.
A politically liberal radio and TV host reflects on his unconventional career path.
Born in 1940, Press (Buyer's Remorse: How Obama Let Progressives Down, 2016, etc.) grew up a strict Catholic in Delaware City. He has happy memories of his childhood and adolescence, but with the benefit of hindsight inflected by progressivism, he observes that life in his hometown was good “as long as you were white.” His first encounter with politics came through his grandfather and father, both of whom served as mayor of their town. Knowing he also wanted a career in public service, Press decided on the priesthood. But after almost a decade studying theology in the U.S. and Europe, he chose to become a “worker priest” rather than a teacher and left for California in 1967. After a few years “protesting the war in Vietnam, counseling runaways in the Haight-Ashbury…and working for Gene McCarthy,” he went to Sacramento to begin his career as a staffer for Democratic state senator Peter Behr. Press then spent the next decade as an environmental activist and then as a key player in Jerry Brown’s 1976 presidential campaign. By 1980, the author had turned his attention to media work, which led to TV and radio jobs at stations in Los Angeles and, later, to the position—as the liberal co-host of CNN’s Crossfire—that brought him to national attention. Throughout the book, the author tends toward frequent name-dropping while expressing an unapologetically leftist perspective that often critiques the current presidential administration. Yet at the same time, he speaks with respect and affection of many of his right-leaning colleagues such as Pat Buchanan, Tucker Carlson, and John McCain. In an age where the debate between left and right has become “ugly and personal” and blighted by negativity, his ability to remain optimistic about politics and disagree with the opposition in a civil manner is a welcome relief.
A lively and refreshing memoir.Pub Date: March 13, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-14715-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 7, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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