Both sympathetic and fair-handed, a solid examination of the “Adversarial Supercouple” before the slide toward scandal and...
A contextual reassessment of the Bill Clinton presidency.
Troy (History/McGill Univ.; Moynihan's Moment: America's Fight Against Zionism as Racism, 2012, etc.), who has written extensively about presidential politics, “seriously” reconsiders the era of the Clinton White House, apart from the media’s obsession with Bill’s and Hillary’s “character flaws.” Bill Clinton dominated the 1990s as Ronald Reagan dominated the 1980s, and in an extraordinarily complex decade that embraced the Internet and what Troy calls “virtual prosperity,” the Clintons were the first baby boomers in the White House to meld their 1960s sensibilities with the modern age. Clinton rode into power on the self-righteous reaction to the daunting domestic challenges that President George Bush preferred to ignore in favor of dealing with the end of the Cold War—namely, racism, sexism, and homophobia. The 1992 election was “a true generational culture clash,” writes the author, and the challenge that the Clintons took up successfully was presenting a program that combined “Wal-Mart populism and Ivy League progressivism.” Recovering from major stumbles during the first year of his presidency and benefiting from a steep learning curve, Clinton managed to build a stable policy foundation on “common ground,” such as a global economy and welfare reform, without expanding the reaches of government. Blessed with heavy-handed enemies who often self-destructed (Newt Gingrich), the Clintons effectively attacked their critics and recast themselves constantly—Bill as the “good father” and Hillary from vilified White House enforcer to the rehabilitated author of It Takes a Village (1996). With plenty of detail, Troy depicts the underlying tensions of this conflicted decade, from the Rodney King beating to the advent of the 24-hour Fox News Channel to the “manufactured miracles” of Silicon Valley.
Both sympathetic and fair-handed, a solid examination of the “Adversarial Supercouple” before the slide toward scandal and impeachment.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-06372-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
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
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
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