Former New York City mayor—columnist—mystery novelist—radio pundit Koch reflects on life at 75, in a book whose meandering nature provides an apt chassis for Koch’s vigorous social views and uniquely optimistic/hectoring outlook. With good humor and mock shock at his longevity and continued public presence, Koch begins by enumerating the many employment venues he’s sampled in his determination to stay productive and relevant: movie critic, SlimFast spokesman, People’s Court judge. Although he’s disingenuous about being called the quintessential New Yorker, Koch embodies his city’s signal qualities, both good (his calls for racial and economic justice) and bad (his unapologetic self-importance). And while Koch’s opinions are usually strident, they are often compelling, as in his scorching attack on the widely accepted business practice of —downsizing— older workers, left to fend for themselves after decades of service. Such diatribes support Koch’s central point: the need to approach human aging shrewdly, in practical terms (money management, retirement savings, health insurance) as well as on the more essential spiritual level of keeping active and engaged with the world. His tone remains tart, but his topics are surprisingly varied: All manner of anecdotes, including graphic notes on his personal health, are followed by keen musings on subjects ranging from the racial disparities of American justice to the problematic state of live theater. And just when you think his opinions on public figures are predictably blunt (as when he savages Rudy Giuliani on civil-liberties grounds), he—ll surprise you with his humanistic consideration of a figure like Al Sharpton. If His Honor seems at times a brash (and now wizened) cartoon character who never spotted a fight or a digression he didn—t like, his latest missive should delight both senior readers, for whom Koch’s admittedly fortunate circumstances may still be instructive, and students of his classic New York attitude. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-688-17075-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1999
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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