Readers interested in academic administration or the history of American universities would do well to spend a couple hours...
The first woman to serve as president of a major research university intermingles her impressive life story with the history of American higher education in the 20th century.
Despite her incredibly impressive resume, Gray (Emeritus, Early Modern European History/Univ. of Chicago; Searching for Utopia: Universities and Their Histories, 2011) is one of those powerful women with whom readers are likely unfamiliar. With the reserved good humor of someone whose goals have all been met, the author gives a precisely detailed record of her life and brilliant career among some of the world’s most gifted intellectuals. The daughter of professors exiled from Germany in the 1930s, she spent her childhood on the Yale campus living out her parents' European ideals with second-generation American energy. After her education at Bryn Mawr and Harvard, she taught Renaissance and Reformation history, and her colleagues quickly learned to value her knack for untangling unforeseen problems and deriving consensus from warring interests. These skills earned her invitations to be a dean at Northwestern and later provost of Yale, and they served her well for more than 15 years as president of the University of Chicago. True to form, she intends her life story to accomplish more than the typical career retrospective, translating her experiences into an insider's history of the perennial struggles and vast changes in higher education during her tenure. Gray never misses an opportunity to pause in her own story to laud the achievements of her fellow second-generation scholars, including many Nobel Prize winners. Her recurring meditations on the perennial questions of academia—the purpose of higher education, where to draw the boundaries of free speech, what to do with football—enliven some of the more tedious recollections. The author never wavers from her ideal vision of a university free from political entanglements as the key to preserving academic freedom.
Readers interested in academic administration or the history of American universities would do well to spend a couple hours in Gray’s edifying company.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-691-17918-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Princeton Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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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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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