President Obama’s running question to Litt was, “so, are we funny?” Yes, they are—and insightful, too.
President Barack Obama’s speechwriter offers his take on an extraordinary tenure inside the White House.
There’s an interesting subcategory of memoirs emerging from the Obama years. Unlike the heavy hitters from the Cabinet, we’re hearing from the young professionals who propelled the senator to power and bore witness to his legacy. They also happen to be some of the funniest workplace comedies on the shelves. In a memoir following closely on the heels of former Deputy Chief of Staff Alyssa Mastromonaco’s book, Who Thought This Was a Good Idea? (2017), Litt, one of the youngest speechwriters in the history of the White House, delivers a fast, funny ride through the halls of power. Haunted by the specter of Sarah Palin (“So, how’s that whole hopey, changey thing workin’ out for ya?”), the author offers a stark contrast in leadership between then and now. Working first for senior adviser Valerie Jarrett before becoming senior presidential speechwriter, Litt admits his impressions were colored by The West Wing: “Like every Democrat under the age of thirty-five, I was raised, in part, by Aaron Sorkin.” He reveals what it’s like to write four White House Correspondents’ Association dinner speeches for the president, and he chronicles some strange encounters with the likes of Scarlett Johansson, Harvey Weinstein, and the comedy duo Key & Peele. But for every White House men’s room anecdote or gee-whiz moment (“Air Force One is exactly as cool as you would expect”), Litt offers piercing assessments of the nature of our politics. “Gridlock is an accident, an inconvenience,” he writes. “What happened on Capitol Hill was a strategy, and its architect was Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell.” His final thoughts, written as the next administration begins its reign, are telling: “But here, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is the single most valuable lesson I learned in public service: There are no grown-ups, at least not in the way I imagined as a kid.”
President Obama’s running question to Litt was, “so, are we funny?” Yes, they are—and insightful, too.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-256845-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
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
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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