Vividly recounts the price of inflexibility and political failure in times of crisis.
A portrait of Abraham Lincoln’s vice president and successor over six crucial weeks that preserved a nation but brought an administration to ruin.
Means, a senior editor at Washingtonian magazine, zeroes in on the aftermath of Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865 to track Andrew Johnson as he completed a seemingly fated transition from promising patriot to bull in his own china shop. So ultimately eclipsed was his promise, in fact, that most readers may have little awareness of the once-acclaimed virtues that propelled the former congressman, senator and governor into his leadership role. The author questions whether any person other than Lincoln himself could have sealed the victory and healed the wounds of our Civil War, then amply shows how Johnson, determined as he was to faithfully implement Lincoln’s legacy as he saw it, was far less than the man for the job. Not that the deck wasn’t stacked against him: A Tennessee Democrat, he was never accepted by key Republicans in the administration—some, including Lincoln’s widow, Mary, actually suspected the 17th president to be a conspirator in the assassination plot—and he was vehemently hated by the Southern plantocracy. To make matters worse, Johnson had delivered an embarrassingly rambling vice-presidential inaugural address stone drunk—an ironic misstep for someone with a reputation as a mesmerizing “stump” speaker built over countless campaigns. His persistent stubbornness and inability to find common ground with Congress on an effective Reconstruction policy left the South in an economic shambles with four million refugees (a hundred times the number created by Katrina, Means points out). And with full enfranchisement of freed slaves ultimately left to the states that had originally enslaved them, a civil-rights gap emerged and dragged tragically on for a century.
Vividly recounts the price of inflexibility and political failure in times of crisis.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-15-101212-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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
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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