Light enough for a dentist’s waiting room, but substantial enough to amuse and inform White House watchers and students of...
Madmen, murderers, miscreants, martyrs: presidents’ children are just like the rest of us, only more so.
So one would conclude from this thoroughgoing compendium by former Bush I administration staffer Wead, whose researches began as a memorandum to the current president when he was contemplating his first run for Texas governor. (No president’s child had ever successfully run for governor, he warned Bush II.) Being the child of a president can be tough duty, Wead capably shows; it makes for loneliness, paranoia, high rates of divorce and alcoholism, and a life expectancy lower than the national norm. It can lead to maladjustment and exceptional nastiness, as witness Alice Roosevelt Longworth, who specialized in bitter complaint about just about every conceivable topic throughout her long life. (Teddy’s daughter died at 96 in 1980, having outlived every other presidential child.) It can yield spasms of rebellion: Patti Davis, Ronald Reagan’s daughter, for example, “took loud, public stands against her father’s policies.” Yet there have also been well-adjusted, happy, and productive presidential progeny: William Howard Taft’s daughter Helen, a notable suffragette; Gerald Ford’s son Steve, an actor familiar to fans of The Young and the Restless and Black Hawk Down; and Amy Carter, a hardworking humanitarian like father Jimmy. Wead’s well-written, gossipy narrative is good fun to read, though it doesn’t boast much analytical power. Readers can fashion from it just about any case they care to on the question of whether a president’s kid is apt to turn out a hero like Webb Hayes (son of Rutherford), who won the Congressional Medal of Honor, or a loser like Marshall Polk (adopted son of James), who died in prison.
Light enough for a dentist’s waiting room, but substantial enough to amuse and inform White House watchers and students of political history.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2003
ISBN: 0-7434-4631-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
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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