Bred in New England reticence and transplanted to rambunctious Texas, acclaimed as a war hero and scorned as a political wimp, George Bush remains the walking contradiction who puzzled Americans, in this dispassionate biography by Parmet (History/City Univ. of New York; JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy, 1983, etc.). Not unlike JFK, Bush came from wealth, served with distinction in WW II's Pacific theater, and became the all-important link in a political dynasty (father Prescott was US senator from Connecticut; son George W. is now governor of Texas). But the differences between the two men loom even larger. Bush's career was shaped by gale-force changes within the Republican Party. He made his way in Texas by allying himself with three new strains of conservatives: oil plutocrats who longed for laissez-faire economics, evangelical Protestants (many suspicious of civil-rights initiatives), and anti-communist zealots of the John Birch variety. Nationally, he made his first run for the presidency just as the New Right became ascendant with the election of Ronald Reagan. As a result, this fiercely driven politician had to wait until he was 64 to achieve the presidency, and to endure humiliations and act in ways he would not ordinarily have desired. Described as decent and loyal by most who knew him well, Bush also felt compelled sometimes to campaign with few scruples (he confessed to his minister that he regretted taking far-right positions in a failed run against Senator Ralph Yarborough in 1964). Parmet uses Bush's diaries and interviews with him and his GOP associates to flesh out this story. Still, he unearths few revelations, other than the Bushes' suspicion that a jealous Nancy Reagan spread false rumors of George's affair with the widow of a congressman. Unlike Parmet's two-volume JFK biography, this suffers from lack of greater access to still-secret materials and to aides with enough distance from the political wars to speak with unbuttoned candor about their boss. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-684-19452-X
Page Count: 554
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1997
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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