Though disconnected, an interesting defense of the 1950s work of columnists Joe and Stewart Alsop. Syndicated columnist Yoder (The Night of the Old South Ball, not reviewed) aims to analyze a potential paradox: Did the influential Alsops' militant anticommunism in foreign policy contradict their ``gallant defense of political civility and civil liberties at home... Were they fighting a fire that they themselves had helped to set?'' To answer, the author mixes biography and history. He first notes that Joe Alsop claimed to have invented the ``domino theory'' and describes how Alsop, unlike some latter-day pundits, believed that not only should a column include new information, but it should also be based on firsthand reporting. Then Yoder steps back to describe the brothers, who grew up as Connecticut Valley gentry, relatives of the Roosevelts: Joe was argumentative, foppish, doomsaying, eccentric; Stewart, four years younger, was far more mundane. Then Yoder covers several controversies, such as the question of ``who lost China.'' Yankee progressives with impeccable anticommunist pedigrees, the Alsops emerged as ``relentless critics'' of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, favoring instead a blue-ribbon panel to probe internal security questions. Yoder also recounts how Joe Alsop deconstructed the spurious claims of Louis Budenz, a former Communist functionary who claimed before Congress that two China experts were Communist dupes. After dealing with the Alsops' defense of the improperly accused J. Robert Oppenheimer, Yoder tells of the growing tensions in the brothers' partnership (which ended in 1958) and of the Soviet Union's attempt to blackmail the homosexual Joe. Then he defends Joe Alsop's 1961 columns on the ``missile gap,'' suggesting they were more sober than others thought. The author's conclusion: The Alsops' views were no paradox, but mostly complementary. He adds an appendix with three columns, plus a useful bibliographic essay. Useful mainly to journalists and history buffs. (First serial to Civilization)
Pub Date: March 31, 1995
ISBN: 0-8078-2190-X
Page Count: 300
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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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