A politician driven by self-interest? The very thought in the matter of the master of Monticello tells us that we live in...
A lucid, gently critical view of the great president and empire-builder and most literate of politicians.
Barring the discovery of a trove of unknown documents, it’s unlikely that anyone will soon find anything new to say on the matter of Thomas Jefferson, and Hitchens (Love, Poverty, and War, 2004, etc.) ventures no discoveries. Yet he has a pleasing way of juxtaposing the known facts with a more nuanced view of his subject than the portraits offered by critics such as David McCullough and worshippers such as Dumas Malone. At the outset, for instance, Hitchens recalls the well-worn datum that Jefferson died on the very same day as his long-time rival John Adams, the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence; Hitchens adds a nice note to the discussion, though, by citing a letter Jefferson had written only days earlier, in which he thundered, “The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” It complicates matters, Hitchens allows, that the “author of America” ignored a fifth of the population when making such pronouncements, though he well recognized the depravity of slavery, and that the same brilliant radical did his best to ensure that the lands of the Louisiana Purchase would be open to the slave trade—and that the minds of Southerners would not be tainted by schools that taught abolitionist “anti-Missourism.” On many such controversial matters, Hitchens decides, Jefferson was motivated by what he thought to be the better interests of the Republic, though “in a smaller number, it is not difficult to read the promptings of personal self-interest.”
A politician driven by self-interest? The very thought in the matter of the master of Monticello tells us that we live in revisionist times. Hitchens’s slender study complements several lives of Jefferson while displacing none, and it’s well worth reading.Pub Date: June 2, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-059896-4
Page Count: 160
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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
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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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