A moving portrait of a presidency and its top speechwriter.
A pertinent chronicle of the making of a president’s messages.
Keenan, who served as Barack Obama’s chief speechwriter, makes an absorbing book debut with an insider’s view of the pressured, often “fucking terrifying” workings within the White House, where he and his staff routinely put in 12-hour days, holed up in the basement “Speechcave,” crafting the president’s public statements. While focusing on 10 days in June 2015, when he worked on several high-stakes speeches, Keenan recounts his entire career, beginning in 2002, when he became an intern for Sen. Ted Kennedy, through to his promotion to Obama’s chief speechwriter in 2013. The author’s first chance at speechwriting came with Kennedy, whom Keenan praises as a public servant “of the old breed who saw politics as a noble calling, an effort that kept differences of philosophy from becoming barriers to cooperation.” When Obama entered the 2008 presidential race, Keenan’s speeches for Kennedy earned him a place in the campaign—and on Obama’s staff. In 2011, assigned to write Obama’s eulogy for those killed in the shooting that wounded Gabby Giffords, Keenan admits, “I was terrified. It would be my first prime-time, nationally televised speech” and one that “needed to stand as a surprising, hopeful, and even joyous celebration of the way the people who died had lived their lives.” The speeches that occupied him in June 2015 were equally significant: responses to the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act, same-sex marriage, and the shooting at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel Church that killed nine people, including the pastor, Clementa Pinckney. Keenan portrays Obama as a perfectionist with clear aims for tone and content. Multiple drafts, edits, and rewrites resulted in the soaring rhetoric for which the former president was noted. In his eulogy for Pinckney, “Grace was what Obama wanted to talk about…the quiet grace that sets a louder example than any shout of hatred.”
A moving portrait of a presidency and its top speechwriter.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-358-65189-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Mariner Books
Review Posted Online: July 25, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
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
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
