A dynamic man at the center of turbulent history has produced an autobiography as anemic as his magazines were vibrant. Managing editor of Life magazine in its glory years, Thompson was in the thick of the tumult that carried the US through WW II, McCarthyism and the Cold War, the early '60s, and the moon landing. He knew the Duke of Windsor, Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, Douglas MacArthur, and Richard Nixon. His staff of photographers is legendary, including Alfred Eisenstaedt, Henri Cartier-Bresson, David Douglas Duncan, Cornell Capa, and Gordon Parks. Thompson went on to found Smithsonian magazine, a colorful publication that ranges engagingly and authoritatively over science and art, past and present. Born and raised in remote St. Thomas, N. Dak., Thompson studied journalism and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Dakota. He moved quickly from jobs on small-town newspapers to the Milwaukee Journal, where he was tapped as editor of the paper's new picture page and Sunday rotogravure section. Based on his performance in Milwaukee, he went to work for the infant Life in 1939. Service during WW II took him overseas with US intelligence (he was assigned to the famous Ultra code-breaking team in England) but didn't slow his rise at Life. He became managing editor in 1949, presiding over some of the magazine's most memorable stories, including the remarkable series ``The World We Live In.'' Justly proud of his accomplishments, Thompson doesn't overinflate his contribution or his relationships with such luminaries as Ernest Hemingway and the Luces (Henry and Clare Boothe). But his mÇtier is clearly the visualeven in chapters about which he must feel a passion, like how issues of the magazines were planned and carried out, the writing falls curiously flat. A disappointingly thin gruel that could have been a rich porridge. (40 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8262-1026-0
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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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