An entertaining, enlightening look at an administration that was never dull.
An oral biography of the Barack Obama administration, culled from interviews conducted between May 2016 and October 2017.
Abrams (Die Hard: An Oral History, 2016, etc.) takes snippets from his interviews with all the players in this real-life drama, from the election through the end of the administration. The flowing narrative includes revealing insights from a wide variety of both Democratic and Republican politicians, speechwriters, attorneys, and others, from David Axelrod to the West Wing receptionist. Readers experience the first campaign and the many attendant doubts, starting with the uncertainty about whether Obama could even win the nomination. Success meant the team had to go into overdrive, and that’s what they did, taking on an economic collapse, the fraught stimulus bill, stabilizing the Middle East cease-fire, and a promise from Republicans that they would never compromise and would fight the Democrats on everything. Luckily, Obama had a great team working with him, most of whom would do anything he asked of them. That was a trait that held throughout the administration, as people who were burned out by life in Washington, D.C., took on even more assignments just because the president asked them. The author effectively shows the incredible patience exhibited by the president and the invaluable help proffered by Vice President Joe Biden, whose 30 years of experience in Washington provided that extra push when it was required (often). Unfortunately, Republicans were sworn to a policy of obstructionism and manipulation of the legislative process, and the frustrations of the president and his staff are abundantly clear throughout the narrative. At the beginning of the book, Abrams lists the “participants” and their titles; in the appendix, the author provides a complete listing of all of the staff members during Obama’s terms in office. Though technically “unauthorized,” Abrams put in the work with his dozens of interviews, and he also “received cooperation from the Obama White House, the Obama Foundation, and the postpresidency Office of Barack and Michelle Obama.”
An entertaining, enlightening look at an administration that was never dull.Pub Date: July 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5039-5166-2
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Little A
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2018
PROFILES
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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