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HAROLD AND JACK

THE REMARKABLE FRIENDSHIP OF PRIME MINISTER MACMILLAN AND PRESIDENT KENNEDY

Crisp personal portraits of two leaders (and their wives) shaping the new world order.

Exploration of the deepening friendship between two contrasting Western leaders at a time of perilous Soviet brinkmanship.

A prolific British-American biographer who grew up in Washington, D.C., Sandford departs from his usual subjects from the world of arts and entertainment (Masters of Mystery: The Strange Friendship of Arthur Conan Doyle and Harry Houdini, 2011, etc.), providing a comparative portrait of two consummate politicians who helped mend the “special relationship” that had soured during the Suez Crisis. Harold Macmillan (1894-1986), a middle-class publisher’s son with a doting American mother, had acceded as British prime minister in the wake of Anthony Eden’s resignation in 1956 and had already been trying to mend fences with the frank President Dwight Eisenhower. With his election in 1960, President John Kennedy, more than two decades Macmillan’s junior, was just the brash, charming and intellectual personality to foil and complement his more formal counterpart’s “mandarin inscrutability.” Sandford delights in contrasting the two characters, ancient and modern, rendering engaging reading through the alarming crises that erupted during the course of Kennedy’s administration. Over numerous visits and increasingly warm communications between the “dear friends,” the two leaders had to work together to manage Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s blustery threats in Berlin and Cuba, where the United States’ highly secretive Bay of Pigs debacle of April 1961 had already chastened the American administration. While Kennedy did not confer with Macmillan before the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, he was “extraordinarily receptive to British counsel,” despite British criticism of Macmillan as “passive” and “supine.” Sandford has an effective sense of character development as the leaders moved from one embroilment to the next.

Crisp personal portraits of two leaders (and their wives) shaping the new world order.

Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2014

ISBN: 978-1-61614-935-2

Page Count: 325

Publisher: Prometheus Books

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2014

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

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  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist

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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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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