A thoroughly researched biography of a remarkable figure.
The story of a dynamic political outsider who mounted a formidable challenge to Franklin D. Roosevelt for the presidency.
In 1940, Roosevelt was deciding whether to run for a third term, a war in Europe was raging, inflaming debate about whether the U.S. should join, and the Republican Party was looking desperately for a candidate who could take back the presidency. The man they chose was Indiana-born Wendell Willkie (1892-1944), a wealthy businessman with no political experience but considerable charm and who only recently had changed party affiliation. “He’ll go down as the darkest horse in the stable for 1940,” said one political commentator. Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Lewis (Emeritus, History/New York Univ.; W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography, 2009, etc.), who was awarded the National Humanities Medal, draws on abundant archival and published material to create a spirited portrait of the charismatic, outspoken Willkie, who took the political spotlight from 1940 until his death four years later. Time magazine founder Henry Luce called Willkie “a force of nature”; decades later, historian David Halberstam characterized him as “the rarest of things in those days, a Republican with sex appeal.” Willkie was forthright in his criticism of FDR, who Willkie claimed curtailed the Bill of Rights, fomented class conflict, undermined business (as president of a major utility company, Willkie was a fierce opponent of the Tennessee Valley Authority and other New Deal programs), and was itching to involve America in another war. Willkie felt no party loyalty but, Lewis asserts, embraced a “creed of liberalism” that “opposed equally unregulated wealth and unlimited government power.” He drew exuberant crowds as he campaigned across the country, and polls showed the election too close to call. Willkie lost to FDR but only by 5 million votes. Post-election, Willkie and FDR became close allies, and after he returned from a fact-finding trip to Europe at FDR’s request, Willkie became a strong interventionist. Lewis recounts Willkie’s prescient views of the postwar world as well as his staunch civil rights advocacy.
A thoroughly researched biography of a remarkable figure.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-87140-457-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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