Ricci (Political Science and American Studies/Hebrew University, Jerusalem) analyzes the growth in numbers and influence of a distinctively modern Washington, D.C., phenomenon: the think tanks. The author, himself a former Brookings Institution scholar, argues that, since 1970, the components of American government have changed fundamentally, led by the decline of party discipline, the end of seniority rules in Congress, and the growth of an independent presidency. Ricci also asserts that burgeoning professionalism, the development of TV, and the refinement of marketing techniques have fundamentally altered policy discourse. He points out that the classical paradigm of American government- -ordinary Americans garnering enough information and wisdom on their own to exercise reasonably the responsibilities of leadership in an orderly democracy—has become outmoded in the modern information age, in which citizens are overwhelmed with a flood of policy-relevant information, and in which diffuse, dissonant groups and points of view influence public policy. Ricci focuses on an alternative model, that of Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis (1624), which described a utopian society guided by the wisdom of scholars working in an institution called ``Salomon's House.'' Ricci argues that ``from time to time and for various reasons, some Washingtonians will reach for reliable information as if it were the sort envisioned by Salomon's House.'' The diverse ideological orientations of the think tanks, he says, have created a ``marketplace of ideas'' that enriches debate by testing a wide range of theories. While Ricci argues that think tanks don't operate exactly how Bacon predicted, he concludes that they do provide a necessary order and coherence to policy debates. An incisive look at the rise of think tanks and at their impact on policy-making.
Pub Date: June 16, 1993
ISBN: 0-300-05340-1
Page Count: 305
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
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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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Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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