A thoughtful, if occasionally strident, account of a neglected aspect of Nixon’s presidency.
A panoramic historical study of President Richard Nixon’s handling of Hispanic affairs, as told by a former White House insider.
In his debut, Ramirez, offers a historical tour de force. Part scholarly study, part ringing celebration of Hispanic-American success, the work is also an intensely personal account of his own evolution as a man juggling dual Mexican and American identities. The analytical meat of the book defends Nixon as the president who effected the most profound changes for the Hispanic community, which began to swell in the United States following World War II. Ramirez focuses on Nixon’s impact on the Mexican population, a “sleeping giant” that quickly catapulted into a major American demographic. “Nixon was the man who grew up with us Mexicans. He knew us, cared about us, and included us,” Ramirez writes. “Let history show that he was the only president who really and truly gave a damn for the Mexicans.” Discussing largely forgotten political operatives such as Robert Finch, Counselor to the President, and Martin Castillo, first Chairman of the Cabinet Committee on Opportunities for Spanish Speaking People, the author persuasively makes a case that Nixon, rather than his predecessors Kennedy and Johnson, was truly devoted to the precarious plight of Hispanic-Americans. Sidestepping some of Nixon’s infamous failings, the analysis sometimes borders on hagiographic. Also, it can be a bit self-referential, detailing maybe too meticulously the author’s privileged vantage point (a lengthy section of the book is entitled “Why I am the One Who Can Tell the Story”). Ramirez bluntly informs readers that the book is “a sine qua non for understanding the rise of the Chicanos and Nixon’s part in it,” and his arguments are well-articulated and rigorously sourced, including extensive appendices of pertinent documents.
A thoughtful, if occasionally strident, account of a neglected aspect of Nixon’s presidency.Pub Date: March 25, 2014
ISBN: 978-0615821931
Page Count: 474
Publisher: Henry M. Ramirez
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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