Although occasionally tendentious—McCraw clearly loves his employer—this is a passionate, important defense of the First...
The deputy general counsel of the New York Times debuts with a personal and professional account of the profound changes in journalism and of the threats he perceives to the First Amendment, threats intensified by the cries of “fake news!” that emanate from the White House and echo around the country.
McCraw, who has been at the Times for more than 15 years, mixes memoir, history, and politics, stirring in a bit of self-effacement (he thought Donald Trump was incapable of winning the 2016 election) with a dash of self-congratulation: He writes extensively about a viral letter he wrote to Trump’s attorneys about a Times story giving voice to two women who had accused the candidate of sexual impropriety. The author briefly tells the story of his own background, but mostly, he maintains a sharp focus on a number of key developments and issues. He writes about the 1964 New York Times Company v. Sullivan case, which made suing the press for libel much more difficult (a 9-0 decision in favor of the Times Company); the president’s tax returns; WikiLeaks and Edward Snowden; the Harvey Weinstein case and the #MeToo movement; the Freedom of Information Act; and the kidnapping of journalists in dangerous parts of the world. Most affectingly, he discusses the wonders of the First Amendment and how we must protect it. Periodically, McCraw expresses disbelief and horror about an American president who blasts the free press and identifies journalists as the enemies of the people. He notes with alarm, as well, how the very wealthy (and very conservative) are funding anti-media lawsuits. Here, he credits comedian John Oliver (whom he calls “brilliant”) for “outing” coal magnate Bob Murray on Last Week Tonight. Throughout, the author highly praises journalists working for the Times.
Although occasionally tendentious—McCraw clearly loves his employer—this is a passionate, important defense of the First Amendment and its absolute necessity in a democracy.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-18442-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: All Points/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2019
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
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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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