Although the narrative is occasionally plodding, Baum’s history is incendiary, providing fuel for many a political fire.
An anecdotal history tracing the fortunes of the American brewing family known as much for its right-wing politics as for
its suds, written by former Wall Street Journal reporter Baum (Smoke and Mirrors, 1996). The founder of the Coors dynasty was Adolph Coors, who arrived in Colorado in 1873 and built a brewery in the foothills above Denver—thereby founding a town that now, Baum observes, feels like "a fragment of Hamtramck, Michigan, dropped amid spectacular Rocky Mountain wilderness." Adolph and his sons had strong feelings about the proper places of bosses and workers, and they made a name for themselves as sometimes beneficent but more often harsh owners who busted unions and relentlessly combed the ranks of their workers to weed out "thieves, radicals, and homosexuals." The Coors family was often innovative in business, introducing the aluminum beverage can into the American market, but Baum maintains that its elders made some bad calls, missing opportunities to capture a homegrown market in mineral water and refusing to pasteurize their beer to allow its sale outside the immediate region. Constantly mired in labor disputes and lawsuits, boycotted by unions and civil-rights groups, the Coors company nevertheless built a huge national market in the 1970s, helped along by Gerald Ford’s publicly admitted fondness for the company’s beer. Now publicly held, the Coors company has made efforts to present itself as politically mainstream by hiring more minority workers, but the changes have only gone so far. As Baum concludes, "Although bludgeoned into becoming more progressive within the walls of its brewery, the Coors family has chosen to remain committed on the national level to reversing the racial, sexual, environmental, and social revolutions of the twentieth century"—reason enough for millions of consumers to insist on boycotting (or buying) the Coors’s brew.
Although the narrative is occasionally plodding, Baum’s history is incendiary, providing fuel for many a political fire.Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-688-15448-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2000
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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