Patriotic musings based on creampuff interviews with some men who were once the most powerful on earth.
Columnist and prolific author Greene (Once Upon a Town, 2002, etc.) sets out to chat with some ex-presidents of the US, not including Bill Clinton. He reaches four out of five.
The journey started two decades ago with the late Richard Nixon in his California lair. The self-absorbed former chief executive asserted to our reporter that he had never seen himself on TV—thus retaining his famous spontaneity, he claimed. Next, Greene spent time with competent, confident Jimmy Carter, often named “the best ex-president.” Mr. and Mrs. Carter were busy with good works and happy to be at home in Georgia. Affable George Bush the Elder, in Chicago on a speaking gig with son Jeb, revealed that in four years as president he never passed through a hotel lobby; he always entered through the kitchens. Erstwhile Grand Rapids football hero Gerald Ford settled in the California desert and even more affable, was fine company too. Indeed, the author found all his interviewees to be quite agreeable. (Greene missed contact with Ronald Reagan before the late great communicator withdrew into the shadows of Alzheimer’s, and the text was obviously completed before his recent death.) What did these members of a very special fraternity have in common other than affability? Secret Service protection and a certain wistfulness, apparently. In his effort to reveal the inner men, Greene asked such posers as: “Did you always wear your suit jacket in the Oval Office?” “Do your closest friends call you ‘Mr. President’?” “How do you buy your shirts?” and “What’s your favorite song?” The answers range from startled inconsequentiality to surprised irrelevance. And yet, the idea of these apparently ordinary men achieving such an extraordinary height seizes the author’s imagination, and ours too. Only in America, truly, can such a fraternity be interviewed in Greene’s content-free way.
Patriotic musings based on creampuff interviews with some men who were once the most powerful on earth.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2004
ISBN: 1-4000-5464-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2004
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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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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