Sound, sturdy, masterfully done.
A staggering work of biography and social history, documenting in exquisite detail the “astonishing life” of the four-term president and world leader.
For Black, the chairman of Hollinger International—publisher of the Chicago Sun-Times, Jerusalem Post, (London) Sunday Telegraph, and many other publications—“astonishing” may even be an understatement, for it is clear throughout that he regards FDR as something rather more than mere mortal, if surely less than saint. Black’s nuanced discussion of Roosevelt’s political missteps in the 1932 presidential campaign, when newsman Walter Lippmann characterized FDR as “a pleasant man who without any important qualifications for the office, would very much like to be President,” speaks well to the author’s sense of balance: Black takes pains to note how FDR waffled on whether the US should back the League of Nations or join the World Court—whether, in short, it should be internationalist or isolationist. Some of that waffling, it appears, was meant to bring the anti-internationalist publisher William Randolph Hearst into the Roosevelt camp, for, Black suggests, FDR was nothing if not calculating, and he reckoned that even though Hearst was disreputable, his “comparative goodwill” might help win the Democratic nomination. (It may have, but, Black notes, Eleanor Roosevelt “was so disappointed with her husband that she didn’t speak to him for some time.”) Once in the White House, FDR faced plenty of challenges, not only in combating the Depression and fascism, but also in coordinating a team of advisors and policymakers who did not much like each other and overcoming his own sometimes haphazard approach to governance; on FDR’s death, Henry Stimson remarked that “his administrative procedures [were] disorderly,” but added, “his foreign policy was always founded on great foresight and keenness of vision.” He rose to those challenges well. Black praises FDR for his domestic accomplishments, observing, for instance, that the WPA alone “built, expanded, or renovated 2,500 hospitals, nearly 4,000 schools, 13,000 parks and playgrounds, 78,000 bridges, and 651,000 miles of road” while also striking “a blow against philistinism, which customarily flourishes in times of economic hardship.” Black is even more thorough in his considered praise of FDR as a statesman, especially in the president’s skill in handling allied leaders who had very different ideas of what to do with the world once they removed Hitler and company from the scene.
Sound, sturdy, masterfully done.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-58648-184-3
Page Count: 1360
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
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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