A revelatory history of America’s grasp for power.
A lively exploration of how “intervene first, ask questions later” became America’s foreign policy beginning with the Spanish-American War.
In 1898, Cuba’s fight for independence from Spain captured the American imagination, inflamed by sensational newspaper reports and dispatches by well-regarded journalists. Many believed that Cuban rebels were starving, perishing on America’s doorstep, and it was the responsibility of the U.S. to intervene “in the name of humanity.” Although President William McKinley and his administration were reluctant to interfere, others pressed for war, the noisiest among them Assistant Secretary of the Navy Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s views prevailed, and his name and fortune became forever linked to a volunteer regiment known as the Rough Riders, whose exploits fed into America’s self-image of courage and invincibility. Drawing on letters, archival sources, and abundant newspaper articles—many from on-site journalists including Richard Harding Davis, Stephen Crane, and Frank Norris—Risen (Single Malt: A Guide to the Whiskies of Scotland, 2018, etc.), deputy op-ed editor at the New York Times, offers a penetrating history of the “half-baked, poorly executed, unnecessary conflict” from which the U.S., nevertheless, emerged victorious. Due to the nation’s limited army and ill-prepared state militias, the war relied on volunteers; many eagerly joined Roosevelt’s “cowboys,” which took its nickname from one of Buffalo Bill Cody’s touring troupes. The Rough Riders were shocked by the reality of Army life: Malodorous cattle ships, refitted to transport troops, teemed with insects; on the island, they lacked food, water, cooking utensils, supplies, medicine—and decisive leadership; malaria, typhoid, and yellow fever raged. Moreover, Cubans were resentful, seeking guns, money, and ammunition—not America’s “rescue.” Although the intervention lasted less than six months, America battled on for another four years, in the end controlling Puerto Rico and part of the Philippines. The war, Risen argues convincingly, shaped the nation’s sense of unity, purpose, and role as an exporter of American values, establishing “the wheels of myth-making, idealism, and national self-interest that would guide the country during the twentieth century.”
A revelatory history of America’s grasp for power.Pub Date: June 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-4399-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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