Perhaps the best one-volume biography of de Gaulle, by the deputy leader of the opposition in the British House of Lords. Although this furrow has, as the author modestly acknowledges, been ``well and truly ploughed by many...much better qualified than myself'' and relies heavily on secondary sources, Williams has had the benefit of discussions with many who knew de Gaulle and brings a sympathetic understanding to a man whose relationship with Britain itself was at best ambivalent, at worst vindictive. De Gaulle took extraordinary risks in the course of his career, beginning with his arrogant advocacy of a war of maneuver before the Second World War, when almost every French general was in favor of the static, Maginot Line approach. As a two-star general, he wrote a blistering letter to Prime Minister Paul Reynaud after the latter had appointed ``men of yesteryear'' to lead the French Army: Two days later, Reynaud appointed de Gaulle undersecretary of war. He had volcanic rows with the British and the Americans—justified, perhaps, by their mistreatment of him. After the war, de Gaulle quickly assumed power in France, outwitting both the Communists and the Resistance, but he left office quickly, when he felt that the Constitution provided for too weak a presidency. Then, after ten years in the wilderness, he returned to power, being the only man in France who enjoyed enough public confidence so that he could take the ruthless steps to extricate France from Algeria by what Williams calls ``a mixture of strength and calculated deception.'' Even in old age, de Gaulle's vanity shone, as expressed in his efforts to recast the nature of Europe by pulling France out of NATO. In telling this well-known story, Williams gives a good sense of a man who in public was ``very cold, ruthless and proud'' but at home could be ``very affectionate, emotional and private.'' Lord Williams's understanding of France, his sensitivity, and his experience of politics combine to make this a memorable achievement.
Pub Date: April 3, 1995
ISBN: 0-471-11711-0
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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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