by Christopher Ogden ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 16, 1994
If the current US ambassador to France, Pamela Harriman, had spent as much time on her back as this book suggests, she would never have had the time to do the world-class housekeeping and flower arrangements that allegedly endeared her to her lovers—let alone become an authority on antiques, bring together historic personalities for global policy discussions, or raise millions of dollars for the Democratic party. Time correspondent Ogden (Maggie, 1990, a biography of Margaret Thatcher) was tapped to do the authorized Pam bio but was dumped, he says, when Ambassador Harriman got cold feet. Ogden had already keyed off ``some forty hours of interviews'' with the subject, for which he was not remunerated according to their original agreement. That may or may not have influenced his perspective when he decided to write the story anyway: He seems to view Harriman as a world-class courtesan. Chapters are for the most part named for the men in her life: Randolph (Churchill—first husband); Averell (Harriman—WW II lover and, decades later, third husband); Bill (Paley, CBS head); Ed (Murrow); JFK (misleading—she was friends with his sister); Gianni (Agnelli, Fiat head); Elie (de Rothschild); Leland (Hayward—second husband); Frank (Sinatra- -houseguest, no affair). For the first 16 (of 19) chapters, the author sniffs disapprovingly at her romantic life (more because she apparently let her lovers support her than because she was promiscuous), although he does admit that father-in-law Winston Churchill and his wife loved and protected her (even after her marriage to Randolph ended) as did most of her ex-lovers. Short on formal education but long on listening skills, Harriman trained that talent on a life lived by her own rules. This is fun to read as the names drop, but it offers more titillation than insight into a woman who rode out from a proper Dorset upbringing to adventure, wealth, power—and acknowledged achievement.
Pub Date: May 16, 1994
ISBN: 0-316-63376-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1994
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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