In a memoir by turns obnoxious and absorbing, the legendary raker of muck, a Pulitzer winner who made Washington news for a half-century while covering it, tells all. A Utah Mormon whose first journalistic scoop exposed unlawful polygamy in his church, Anderson already had a sensational past as an exotic war correspondent in China when he became the protÇgÇ of master gadfly Drew Pearson in 1947. Pearson introduced Anderson to the byzantine byways of the capital and bequeathed to the neophyte a philosophy to muckrake by: “write a good column,” he told Anderson. It was advice the young journalist took to heart when he took over the Pearson’s column, “Washington Merry Go-Round,” in 1969. Anderson cultivated sources in every administration since Truman to keep his hard- hitting column supplied with a yeasty potpourri of facts and allegations. As a result, Anderson discomfited presidents, congressmen, and bureaucrats with public disclosures of corruption, venality, and incompetence, and, in his zeal for the scoop, may have sometimes humiliated his targets with reportorial overreaching (Anderson apologizes, in particular, for a column laced with innuendoes about the sexual preferences of Spiro Agnew’s son). Anderson seems to have been at the center of every major Washington scandal—Watergate, Abscam, the Bert Lance—BCCI scandal, the Iran-contra deal—and many minor ones, most of which he exposed for the first time in his column. Anderson felt the rage of the powerful: he was dogged by the CIA and FBI, audited by the IRS, subjected to lawsuit after lawsuit, even given the supreme honor of a place on Richard Nixon’s “enemies list.” Though Anderson’s righteous tone can irritate, his colorful stories fascinate, and he makes a persuasive case that a democracy needs mavericks like him to expose clandestine presidential deals, violations of public trust, and secret abuses of power A worthy summation of the work of a Washington outsider who made a distinguished career out of exposing the insiders. ($100,000 ad/promo; TV/radio satellite tour)
Pub Date: Oct. 12, 1999
ISBN: 0-312-85602-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
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
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.
Atlanticsenior 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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