A book that will appeal to readers convinced that Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s email habits are the most pressing concerns...
A conservative polemic against “big government” disguised as a memoir of government service.
After serving in the Secret Service for more than 10 years, Bongino (Life Inside the Bubble: Why a Top Ranked Secret Service Agent Walked Away From It All, 2013) ran for the Senate in Maryland in 2011 and for Congress in 2014, both times unsuccessfully. As he writes, he “had resigned from the agency…to run in a deep blue state, as a Republican, against the sitting President’s policies.” The connotation is that Bongino’s inside-the-Beltway position revealed many disturbing secrets about policymaking and political access. Yet his discussion of his Secret Service career is mainly anecdotal, interspersed with assertions about his peers’ unparalleled abilities and teamwork. Otherwise, Bongino holds the federal government in contempt, particularly his former commander in chief: “President Obama and his hard-left allies will never understand ‘the code’ [of the Secret Service] because they will never understand ‘the team.’ ” This disdain for Obama drives much of the narrative. The author’s tactic is to introduce a particular buzzworthy scandal—e.g., the IRS’s targeting of conservative nonprofits, the purported Benghazi cover-up, the prisoner swap involving Bowe Bergdahl—and then follow up with overlong paragraphs that don’t move beyond insinuation. He thus insists these matters reveal “an administration where the sheer number of government scandals and abuses of power overwhelmed the institutional defense mechanisms.” In late chapters, Bongino focuses on perceived flaws of American electoral politics, with broad-canvas topics like “Why Blue States Matter.” His writing becomes more thoughtful when he looks past his obsession with Obama’s “collectivism,” but it remains studded with platitudes—e.g., “Americans never surrendered their homes and fortunes to the whims and wants of either bandits or bureaucrats.” Even the author’s more interesting political observations and anecdotes, such as advising conservatives to emulate progressive groups’ tactics while ignoring their messages, underline his fundamental cynicism.
A book that will appeal to readers convinced that Benghazi and Hillary Clinton’s email habits are the most pressing concerns Americans now face.Pub Date: Jan. 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-08298-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
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
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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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