A useful exposé of how things get done—and buried—in Washington.
Washington insider and accomplished journalist Drew (The Corruption of American Politics, 1999, etc.) provides a fly-on-the-wall portrait of the congressional maverick and his struggle to reform campaign-finance laws.
To judge by this account, Arizona senator John McCain—war hero, patrician, and thorn in the sitting president’s side—has a long memory for slights, favors, and betrayals, a memory fully engaged in the business of schmoozing, cajoling, and arm-twisting his way to a major overhaul of how dollars come into politicians’ hands. McCain, Drew reports, is an outspoken foe of pork-barrel spending, and as she follows him from room to room in the Capitol, she finds him battling such things as an Alabama senator’s request for $2 million to repair a Birmingham-area statue of the Greek god Vulcan and “a particularly egregious boondoggle by which the Air Force was to lease a hundred new Boeing jets—which it hadn’t requested—for ten years, paying ninety percent of their cost, and then give them back to Boeing with at least twenty more years of usefulness remaining.” At the top of McCain’s agenda throughout is a series of bills meant to curtail the corporate soft money that keeps congressmen in power, bills mostly opposed by his fellow Republicans. Drew ably captures McCain in action as he works the floor and offers vivid details on the formidable array of enemies he has attracted as he presses his cause, not least of them George Bush, who in the South Carolina primary mounted what one local politician described as “the dirtiest, nastiest campaign I’ve ever seen” while battling McCain for the Republican presidential nomination. Drew clearly approves of McCain, though never so much as to allow partisanship to get in the way of her usual careful reporting.
A useful exposé of how things get done—and buried—in Washington.Pub Date: May 13, 2002
ISBN: 0-7432-3002-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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