Matthews, the news anchor of the televison show America's Talking, offers an on- target dual portait of rival aspirants for the presidency, both eventually successful in their quest for the prize, both destined to end tragically. Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy, Navy veterans of WW II, were elected as members of the House of Representatives' freshman class of 1946. At first they were friendly rivals: Matthews writes touchingly of their cordial personal relationship as colleagues (often sickly during his Senate career, Kennedy received regular hospital visits from the sympathetic Nixon). Nixon rose first, winning the vice presidency under Dwight Eisenhower (Kennedy cheered Nixon's rise in a personal note to the new vice president) and building a national reputation. The bitter and close-fought campaign of 1960 transformed the relationship between the two men: In the now legendary televised debates, Nixon came off as colorless and tired, while the handsome, relaxed Kennedy impressed viewers with his wit and command of detail. As the author shows, the exchanges between the two rivals, who were never far apart on policy matters, became abusive and personal as Election Day approached. In the end, Nixon lost the popular poll by little more than 100,000 votes. Bitter about alleged ballot theft in Texas, Illinois, and elsewhere, Nixon was convinced for the rest of his life that he'd been ambushed by the Kennedy machine. Nixon was eclipsed during Camelot's thousand days: even after Kennedy's 1963 assassination, he was haunted by the ghosts of Camelot and, more concretely, by the political prospects of Kennedy's brothers. Succumbing to paranoia even after his election to the presidency in 1968, Nixon conducted covert surveillances and smear campaigns against Ted Kennedy, Kennedy family allies, and other political opponents, a propensity that contributed to his eventual downfall and disgrace. Matthews doesn't break new ground, but he draws a striking picture of the destruction of a political friendship and its consequences for the country. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen) (First serial to Vanity Fair and Reader's Digest; author tour)
Pub Date: June 3, 1996
ISBN: 0-684-81030-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1996
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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