Costigliola provides engaging pick-and-choose historical highlights rather than a fluent narrative.
A meandering mishmash of biography and history delves into the personalities of World War II’s Grand Alliance—especially its “fulcrum,” FDR.
Roosevelt kept the three Allies working together to fend off the Nazi menace, balancing the tenacity of Churchill with the ruthlessness of Stalin by sheer dint of Roosevelt’s magnetic personality. Yet by FDR’s death in 1945 the alliance cracked, and President Truman, no friend of the Soviets, allowed the prevailing suspicions among the three to undermine the postwar relationships and usher in the Cold War. In this sometimes entertaining but thematically flailing work, Costigliola (History/Univ. of Connecticut; France and the United States: The Cold Alliance Since World War II, 1992, etc.) casts among the diplomatic players that contributed both to the success of the Grand Alliance and its unraveling. The author compares the background and schooling of the three—e.g., the privileged aristocracies of Churchill and Roosevelt versus the hardscrabble working-class upbringing of Stalin and the varying degrees of parental love (e.g., Stalin was brutalized by his father, while Roosevelt was doted upon by his mother) as having affected their respective leadership styles. In particular, Costigliola traces the indispensable working friendship between Roosevelt and Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, who became “in effect his chief-of-staff,” and Roosevelt and Harry Hopkins, a man of action who moved into the White House during the war years so that he could be at Roosevelt’s disposal. Both Churchill and Stalin, likewise suffering ill health due to the pressures of war, had their long-suffering assistants, while Stalin had his “political club,” who adored their leader but felt abused by the purges, and grew resentful. All worked their personal touch at conferences such as Yalta and Tehran. With Roosevelt’s death, relations with the Soviets were dominated by issues around the atomic bomb, and alarmist policies over Soviet intentions fueled perilous mutual distrust.
Costigliola provides engaging pick-and-choose historical highlights rather than a fluent narrative.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-691-12129-1
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A...
Valediction from the late neurologist and writer Sacks (On the Move: A Life, 2015, etc.).
In this set of four short essays, much-forwarded opinion pieces from the New York Times, the author ponders illness, specifically the metastatic cancer that spread from eye to liver and in doing so foreclosed any possibility of treatment. His brief reflections on that unfortunate development give way to, yes, gratitude as he examines the good things that he has experienced over what, in the end, turned out to be a rather long life after all, lasting 82 years. To be sure, Sacks has regrets about leaving the world, not least of them not being around to see “a thousand…breakthroughs in the physical and biological sciences,” as well as the night sky sprinkled with stars and the yellow legal pads on which he worked sprinkled with words. Sacks works a few familiar tropes and elaborates others. Charmingly, he reflects on his habit since childhood of associating each year of his life with the element of corresponding atomic weight on the periodic table; given polonium’s “intense, murderous radioactivity,” then perhaps 84 isn’t all that it’s cut out to be. There are some glaring repetitions here, unfortunate given the intense brevity of this book, such as his twice citing Nathaniel Hawthorne’s call to revel in “intercourse with the world”—no, not that kind. Yet his thoughts overall—while not as soul-stirringly inspirational as the similar reflections of Randy Pausch or as bent on chasing down the story as Christopher Hitchens’ last book—are shaped into an austere beauty, as when Sacks writes of being able in his final moments to “see my life as from a great altitude, as a sort of landscape, and with a deepening sense of the connection of all its parts.”
If that promise of clarity is what awaits us all, then death doesn’t seem so awful, and that is a great gift from Sacks. A fitting, lovely farewell.Pub Date: Nov. 24, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-451-49293-7
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Oct. 31, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
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.
Atlanticsenior 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
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