by Claire McCaskill with Terry Ganey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 11, 2015
An uneven but quietly charming, inspiring memoir.
The first woman from Missouri elected as a U.S. senator explores how she fuses traditional notions of femininity with boldness and ambition.
In her first book, McCaskill, with the assistance of journalist Ganey (Innocent Blood, 1990, etc.), recounts how, in the 1950s, female drive and a life outside the home weren't considered “ladylike.” However, her father gave her permission to be bossy and opinionated, and her mother raised her daughters to have independent minds. McCaskill’s career demonstrates how her collegial nature has benefitted her and earned her respect throughout her career. The author’s stories of her early days as a prosecutor and in the Missouri legislature are written to entertain, but they also illustrate the many obstacles she faced early in her career, often against various old-boys' networks in government. She runs down details of seemingly every issue in every one of her campaigns, including her potentially scandalous divorce—which she met head-on with candor and honesty; voters admired her "uncanny ability to deal with adversity.” McCaskill's storytelling style is quick-moving and demonstrates the breadth of her authenticity and commitment to being accountable to her constituents, but the book loses some of its color when she recounts examples of greater senatorial business and what she regards as exasperating "boondoggles" among her colleagues. Her characteristic skill, which would be impressive for senators from either side of the aisle, is her genuine connection with voters: she identifies their core concerns, empathizes and relates to them, and assures them that the government is hearing their voices. It is clear from her life stories that the author has always displayed the ability to make allies out of adversaries—whether in the House or Senate or during her methodical campaign for homecoming queen in high school.
An uneven but quietly charming, inspiring memoir.Pub Date: Aug. 11, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5675-2
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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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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