Adulatory reflections on a historic presidency sure to fuel hope for future elections.
Firsthand accounts of the Obama for America presidential campaign.
To oral historian Liddell-Westefeld, the impressive conviction of Barack Obama’s political campaigns was undeniable. Initially a devoted campaign volunteer, the author eventually moved on to join the Obama White House staff. Prior to leaving his five-year post with the president, Liddell-Westefeld questioned what compelled so many youth to volunteer for the 2008 campaign and what could be gleaned from its organic success for use in future nominations. The answers are embedded in the 200 interviews he conducted with alumni of the caucus effort, including former field organizers and directors, volunteers, college students, activists, speechwriters, and many others who devoted their time and energies to the success of a hopeful underdog whom the author calls “America’s most unlikely president.” In addition to Liddell-Westefeld’s personal narrative about his experiences, scores of enthusiastic volunteers and supportive politicians contribute to a readable collective chorus of hopeful voices tirelessly promoting Obama’s patriotism, moral clarity, and honorable leadership. Each member of this fellowship applauds Obama for representing what former speechwriter Jon Favreau called “something different…something outside of Washington” in a country that sorely needed it. As a campaign diary, the book succeeds in gathering representative perspectives from those who participated in its success. Through its interview snippets, the text captures the decisive moments of the journey, from the first inklings of a party nomination at “Camp Obama” through the struggle to garner supporters and up to the final moments as history was made. Kal Penn, the actor and activist, felt “simultaneously very proud of the work that we had done and very humbled by what was about to happen over the next four years.” These voices, which also include David Plouffe, Valerie Jarrett, David Axelrod, Alyssa Mastromonaco, and Obama himself, show the power of grassroots organization.
Adulatory reflections on a historic presidency sure to fuel hope for future elections.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5417-3061-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
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
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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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