An enjoyable, tawdry read that covers little new ground.
Compulsively readable account and analysis of President Clinton’s years out of office, perfectly timed for his “First Laddie” campaign.
What does a man do after leading the Free World for eight years? In Clinton’s case, apparently, he makes millions of dollars in speeches, helps eradicate global poverty and childhood obesity and angles to get his wife to succeed him in the White House. Oh, and jet around the world with billionaire playboy Ron Burkle, have alleged affairs with numerous women and derail his wife’s presidential run with excessive self-absorption. The post-presidential Clinton is quite like the Oval Office Clinton, argues Felsenthal (Princess Alice: The Life and Times of Alice Roosevelt Longworth, 2003, etc.): He has considerable gifts but is laid low by his equally large faults. The book is as ambiguous as its subject. Drawing on meticulous research (albeit mostly from press accounts), the author provides great insight into what Clinton the man is actually like, but doesn’t uncover any real news. Filled with salacious details, this a remarkably easy read, though Felsenthal’s sentences are flat. Also…her…use…of…so….many…ellipses is distracting and prompts doubts about whether she is accurately conveying the spirit of what her sources said. Clinton comes across as an immensely compelling figure easily waylaid by glamour and glitz and too self-absorbed to actually ever feel anyone else’s pain. The author compares his post-presidency to those of his good pal George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter (specifically Clinton’s pursuit of the Nobel Peace Prize). But Clinton is such a unique figure in American political history—and, if his wife wins the nomination and the election, is destined to become even more unique—that these comparisons ring hollow. Overall, the reader is left with a feeling that the last eight years of his life have been much like the previous eight: great potential easily distracted.
An enjoyable, tawdry read that covers little new ground.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-123159-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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