An engrossing history that sheds light on our own fractious times.
A revealing biography of a complex, contradictory political leader.
For more than three decades, James Claude Wright Jr. (1922-2015) represented Fort Worth, Texas, in Congress, including stints as majority leader and, finally, in the position he coveted: speaker of the House. A liberal Democrat from a conservative district, he served under eight presidents, earning a reputation as an astute pragmatist “able to bridge divides.” Flippen (History/Southeastern Oklahoma State Univ.; Jimmy Carter, the Politics of Family, and the Rise of the Religious Right, 2011, etc.) draws on Wright’s memoirs, diaries, and papers; copious library and newspaper archives; and interviews (including conversations with Wright) to offer a definitive, richly detailed biography. Besides creating an indelible portrait of Wright, the author offers a vivid, eye-opening history of profound change in American politics since the 1950s, when Wright was elected to Congress: “consensus politics giving way to harsher partisan discord, and compromise turning into personal invective.” By the time Wright was forced to resign in 1989, “partisanship and scandal, driven in part by more efficient gerrymandering and the proliferation of new media, now defined government.” No leader is without enemies—and Wright, Flippen reveals, made some poor personal choices—but the successful campaign to oust him reflected a pervasive, malignant “devolution of political civility” incited by a vicious Newt Gingrich. In addition, his style of leadership was undermining his power, with many Democrats resenting “his forceful hand” and his tendency to dictate rather than consult. Wright’s liberal views were circumscribed by his conservative roots: progressive on many issues—the environment, education, and civil rights—he nevertheless supported the Vietnam War; opposed abortion and forced school integration; and upheld citizens’ right to bear arms. Flippen examines his relationships with vastly different presidents, most of whom—Ronald Reagan excepted—he found ways to support. He even found common ground with Richard Nixon, refusing for too long to believe the “litany of dirty tricks and corruption” accusations that led to the president’s resignation.
An engrossing history that sheds light on our own fractious times.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4773-1514-9
Page Count: 540
Publisher: Univ. of Texas
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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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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