Cool, lucid account of the later years of a towering cold-war figure; by Brinkley (History/Hofstra Univ.). Dean Acheson had two careers: one a nearly seamless ascent (Groton, Yale, Navy, Harvard Law) to secretary of state under Truman; the other, beginning with a testy 50's interregnum as gadfly to the Republican Party, is Brinkley's subject. Bedeviled by McCarthyist charges that he had ``lost China'' and was soft on Communism, Acheson emerged a different and puzzling man, a bellicose adviser to several Presidents he had previously scorned, and dangerously acerbic. Acheson, said Chester Bowles in 1963, ``likes not only to disagree with people, but to destroy them if he can.'' Brinkley reveals the furies unleashed in this determined anti-Communist by right-wing attacks, showing Acheson's evolution into a power-player whom men like Robert Kennedy and Dean Rusk saw as ``heedless and unrelenting...deformed in the crucible of McCarthyism.'' The author balances history and biography expertly, maintaining clear focus on Acheson's analysis of events and his complex personal interplay with the statesmen of his time. A superhawk on Vietnam, Acheson managed to work with the cautious JFK not only because Acheson was a loyal Democrat and consummate professional but also, as is clear throughout, because of his need to be close to power. Though perceived by Kennedy as ``an old man from another era,'' Acheson became a valued adviser from the Berlin Wall and Cuban missile crises through the events in Cyprus and Vietnam, but particularly in Europe, where he shored up relations with de Gaulle, Adenauer, and others. Acheson performed similar services for LBJ and, amazingly, for his old enemy Nixon, provoking Acheson's wife to regret that ``her husband had fallen prey to a campaign of flattery waged by Nixon and Kissinger.'' Even Acheson, for all his crustiness, would have respected the clear, concise writing and objectivity of this fine political biography. (Twenty illustrations—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-300-04773-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1992
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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