Tendentious, sure, but always informed.
In the 1964 presidential election, LBJ demolished Goldwater (who won only his home state of Arizona and five Southern states), but the campaign was merely the first step in what would become a brisk and massive march of conservatives across America.
In his debut work, Middendorf (a former US Ambassador to the Netherlands and Secretary of the Navy) looks back with a fond and even paternal eye on the nativity of the conservative movement. He attributes Goldwater’s loss to a number of factors—inexperienced campaign organizers and workers (the author held various fundraising positions), an unpredictable candidate (the Senator’s intransigence and inability to govern his tongue were liabilities), a hostile press (those media liberals!) and some dirty tricks by the Democrats and especially by LBJ, who was a drunk (the press wouldn’t report it) and who employed both the CIA and the FBI to spy on the Goldwater campaign. Possibly the US Postal Service went postal, too, by issuing, just before the election, a stamp commemorating Social Security. Middendorf implies that the Democrats have asked for what’s ensued (Willie Horton and Swiftboating), and that the elephants never would have been so naughty had not the donkeys first been so devious. His political preferences aside, Middendorf has written an interesting insider’s account of that election and its aftermath—and he notes with pride that just two years later, the GOP made solid gains in local, state and national elections. The author has kind words for William F. Buckley Jr. (“our philosophical guru”) but admits the Goldwater team kept Buckley and the National Review crowd at the margins (their GOP votes were certain; no need to alienate moderates). Middendorf does his best to assure readers that Goldwater was not a racist, not a nuclear gunslinger, not a fascist, not a homophobe. The author writes, too, of the rise of the GOP stars who soon followed: Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
Tendentious, sure, but always informed.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-465-04573-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Basic Books
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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