by Dan Pfeiffer ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 19, 2018
A nostalgic look back and hopeful look forward.
Another Barack Obama staffer reveals his White House experiences.
During his campaign for the presidency and his two terms in office, Obama gathered a cadre of young, articulate, and apparently tireless men and women to serve him. In his debut memoir, Pfeiffer, now co-host of the political podcast Pod Save America, recounts his stints as Obama’s traveling secretary during the campaign and later director of communications (2009-2013) and senior adviser (until 2015). The author’s warm, affectionate portrait of Obama and revelations about pre-Trumpian politics complement recent memoirs by Alyssa Mastromonaco (deputy chief of staff), David Litt (speechwriter), Pat Cunnane (senior writer), and David Axelrod (political adviser) in what appears to be a growing genre. Pfeiffer, an unabashed admirer, burnishes a familiar image of Obama as focused, idealistic, pragmatic, funny, caring, shrewd, savvy, and confidently competitive. “Obama does not like to lose at anything,” writes the author, “—golf, basketball, cards, Scrabble, and most certainly campaigns.” The author disputes the notion that Obama was aloof: “He is a truly decent and empathetic human who genuinely liked being around people (less so members of Congress angling for a photo and a pork barrel project).” He was challenged, though, by a Republican Congress determined to thwart every effort and policy decision and from a vicious media firestorm—eagerly propagated by Fox—over his place of birth. “If you want to know why nativism and racism are resurgent in the Republican Party,” the author writes, “look to Fox News. And if you want to know how we ended up with Trump as president, yet again just look to Fox News.” Part of Pfeiffer’s motivation in writing is to encourage voters—especially millennials—“to knock the GOP upside the head and convince them that they have to abandon not just Trump but Trumpism.” The current Republican Party is composed of “clowns, con men, and racists” and those who enable them, such as “diabolical” and “cynical” Mitch McConnell. Pfeiffer argues that a new path requires Democrats to be “audacious, authentic, and inspirational.”
A nostalgic look back and hopeful look forward.Pub Date: June 19, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5387-1171-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: April 30, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2018
Share your opinion of this book
More by Dan Pfeiffer
BOOK REVIEW
by Dan Pfeiffer
BOOK REVIEW
by Dan Pfeiffer
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
Awards & Accolades
Likes
21
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
winner
New York Times Bestseller
IndieBound Bestseller
National Book Award Winner
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Ta-Nehisi Coates
BOOK REVIEW
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
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.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.