by Carl Oglesby ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2008
A worthy complement to Kirkpatrick Sale’s SDS, Daniel Ellsberg’s Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, David...
Maybe you do need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows—in, say, the middle of a cyclone. Enter Oglesby (Who Killed JFK?, 1991, etc.), revolutionary, enemy of the people and evenhanded chronicler of days past.
When the ’60s writ large began around 1964, Oglesby was working as a technical writer for a defense contractor, occasionally bemused by his bosses’ attitudes—they drank a congratulatory toast when JFK gave way to LBJ, sure that war profits were soon to increase—but mostly content to keep his head down. The defense work wasn’t far-fetched: Oglesby points out early on that the anti-war movement wasn’t pacifist or anti-war as such, just anti-Vietnam, which to everyone but just those profiteers looked like a bad idea from the beginning. Contentment gave way to gnawing doubts, and Oglesby, by now involved in Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), found himself in South Vietnam—not bearing arms, but gathering information for the growing anti-war movement, learning from the opposition there, anticommunist and anti-American at once, that Vietnam needed two things: to be free and to be rich. Though Oglesby rose to prominence in the SDS and the anti-war movement, as he charts here, he did not adapt, in the end, to the rise of the New Left and its doctrinaire ways. Toward the end of the book, we find him facing a self-styled people’s tribunal, courtesy of the Weather Underground, for the crime of having “sat on a panel with the fascist pig Herman Kahn.” Oglesby’s elegy for the sensible opposition, replaced by a different version of SDS and its antiwar kin in which just about every second person was an undercover cop or informant, makes useful reading for activists today.
A worthy complement to Kirkpatrick Sale’s SDS, Daniel Ellsberg’s Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, David Maraniss’s They Marched Into Sunlight: War and Peace Vietnam and America October 1967 and other tales of the movement.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-4736-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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