Eisenhower historian Nichols (A Matter of Justice: Eisenhower and the Beginning of the Civil Rights Revolution, 2007, etc.) provides a richly contextual reappraisal of a telling year in the presidency.
The year 1956 could have been potentially calamitous for President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Months after a debilitating heart attack, he underwent emergency intestinal surgery, yet nonetheless decided to tackle the rigors of reelection campaigning. Meanwhile, Egypt and Israel were preparing to ignite a conflagration in the Sinai just as President Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal, and American allies Britain, France and Israel decided to invade the region in November without informing the United States of their plans. Further, the Soviet Union took advantage of the “moral smoke screen” to ruthlessly quell the democratic uprising in Hungary. However, the precarious events of the year only elicited Eisenhower’s legendary mettle, as Nichols reveals in this suspenseful study that moves chronologically through the days in which the U.S. government was on tenterhooks. Eisenhower was a master planner and delegator, but first and foremost, he was a soldier whose unique perspective on World War II had resolved him to avoid another war at all costs. “We believe that the power of modern weapons makes war not only perilous—but preposterous—and the only way to win World War III is to prevent it,” he declared in November. Wary of the Soviets and disgusted with the British, Eisenhower adamantly opposed military invention once Nasser announced the news about the Suez. Along with Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, the president advocated peace talks, all the while Israel, France and Britain were secretly plotting Operation Musketeer. The multifaceted crisis struck right around Election Day, yet a cease-fire was soon instated, the election won by a landslide and his Eisenhower Doctrine formulated, which has somewhat contained the fragile tension of the Middle East until today.
A solid revisiting of this compelling leader about whom we are still learning. See David Eisenhower and Julie Nixon Eisenhower’s Going Home to Glory (2010) for even more fresh information about this fascinating president.Pub Date: March 22, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-3933-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2011
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE
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