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THE NEGOTIATOR

A MEMOIR

A sometimes-sludgy gumbo of a memoir that could use more salt.

A former U.S. Democratic senator for Maine and Presidential Medal of Freedom winner revisits significant moments in his long public and private life.

Mitchell was Senate majority leader (1989-1995) and left that now-costive body in 1995 to see more of his family and to pursue some other challenges, from baseball to Northern Ireland. He begins with family background (money was tight; everyone worked hard), telling a few childhood anecdotes that seem well-polished by campaign repetition. He had an influential high school English teacher who gave him Steinbeck to read. He worked his way through Bowdoin College, joined ROTC and entered the pre-Vietnam–era military, working in Berlin for the Office of Security. Then came law school and politics, where he fell under the sway of Sen. Ed Muskie, who subsequently became an ardent supporter of Mitchell’s career. The author’s segments on his political doings veer back and forth between detailed accounts of various legislative activities (the Clean Air Act) and lines that seem lifted from his stump speeches (“My father had told me that hard work could solve any problem”). Mitchell blasts Oliver North for lying during the Iran-Contra controversy, skims over the details of his divorce and remarriage, crows a bit about the benefits he was able to gain for Maine, and rails about the demands of fundraising. Following his Senate career, he took on numerous assignments—ranging from the thankless to the intractable—including Northern Ireland, Disney (where he served on the board of directors), the Salt Lake City Olympics (he does not mention Mitt Romney), the baseball drug scandals, and the Middle East, where he—like everyone else—failed to negotiate a deal for a Palestinian state. He ends with a saccharine self-help chapter about negotiating.

A sometimes-sludgy gumbo of a memoir that could use more salt.

Pub Date: May 5, 2015

ISBN: 978-1-4516-9137-5

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Oct. 8, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015

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BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME

NOTES ON THE FIRST 150 YEARS IN AMERICA

This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”

Awards & Accolades

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  • Kirkus Reviews'
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  • Pulitzer Prize Finalist


  • National Book Award Winner

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

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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