Sullenberger has provided a real service in presenting these courageous American leaders and their stories.
With the assistance of Century (co-author, with Ice-T: Ice, 2011, etc.), Sullenberger (Highest Duty: My Search for What Really Matters, 2009) presents “a contemporary version” of John F. Kennedy's Profiles in Courage.
Following his heroic landing of U.S. Airways Flight 1549 on the Hudson River, the author met with first officer Jeff Skiles to discuss how to move forward as private individuals faced with unsought public notoriety. They resolved to use their “new platform for the greater good” by serving as advocates and champions for aviation safety and the profession of airline pilots. But first they had to prepare themselves to deal with the new challenge. This book is an outgrowth of that process, as they rose to master new responsibilities and obligations. Sullenberger calls it “a kind of personal quest,” which brought him into contact with the 11 people whose stories form the core of his book. Among others, they include three-time World Series–winning baseball manager Tony La Russa; Admiral Thad Allen, who brought innovative methods and a “fresh eye” to dealing with the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina; Gene Kranz, the NASA Flight Director who stood up for the astronauts' safety against NASA's bureaucracy, and who brought Apollo 13 and its crew safely home; and Michelle Rhee, who was brought in to overhaul the Washington, D.C., school system and produced remarkable results over three years. Sullenberger is also concerned with how people build loyalty and empower others, as well as how they respond to crises. He highlights the role of Jim Sinegal at Costco, who has defended his employees and customers against stockholders.
Sullenberger has provided a real service in presenting these courageous American leaders and their stories.Pub Date: May 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-06-192470-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2012
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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