An elucidating, poignant study of an elusive leader.
Though ailing, exhausted, and stretched to the limit, Franklin Roosevelt had a driving mission until the end.
While famous for his first 100 days—during which an epic number of laws were passed to relieve the suffering caused by the Great Depression—President Roosevelt spent his last days at the end of World War II reduced in physical strength but not mental capacity, accomplishing some of the most important work of his presidency. Woolner (History/Marist Coll.; co-editor: Progressive Politics in America: Past, Present and Future, 2016, etc.) argues that while FDR was famously unfathomable (“I never let my right hand know what my left hand does”), he was absolutely dedicated to his job, and ill health would not stop him from accomplishing the most important item of the postwar peace: the creation of the United Nations. Using newly available archival sources, such as memos from his physicians who kept his secrets, the Grace Tully papers, and those of Sarah Churchill, present at the Yalta Conference, as well as a “recently constructed day-to-day calendar of his activities and contacts,” the author assembles an impressively authoritative look at Roosevelt’s last days. By the consensus of his team of physicians, FDR did not have the stamina to withstand a fourth term, yet he would run and win to keep Americans hopeful that 1945 would bring victory and enduring peace. Indeed, he was pressed by “a terrible sense of urgency” as he furiously prepared for Yalta, where he would meet Winston Churchill and Joseph Stalin and hammer out a postwar peace. In the bulk of the book, Woolner lays out the argument that though obviously physically debilitated, FDR held his own against Stalin, especially regarding Poland, despite heavy criticism. Furthermore, meeting King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia afterward at the Great Bitter Lake “marked the first formal intrusion by the American government into the struggle between the Arabs and the Jews in Palestine.”
An elucidating, poignant study of an elusive leader.Pub Date: Dec. 12, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-465-04871-7
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 18, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2017
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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