You must admire a man whose career advice included, “I often say it’s a gift to be fired at least once,” and “it is always...
A man of many contradictions looks back on a lifetime of service to people in the public and private sectors.
Vaughn (1920-2012) may not have the name recognition of contemporaries like George McGovern or Sargent Shriver, but his influence echoes through the fabric of American life. Vaughn worked on this autobiography from 1992 until his death, and his daughter, Constantineau, completed the project. To her credit, Vaughn’s distinctive voice and sense of humor remain. A politically conservative but socially liberal public servant, Vaughn served as the second director of the Peace Corps, ambassador to Panama and Colombia, and head of the National Urban Coalition and Planned Parenthood Federation of America. What could have been—and sporadically is—a dry accounting of a career in service is punctuated by Vaughn’s colorful personality and front-row seat to world history. The author describes fighting as a Marine in bloody battles in Guam and Okinawa and boxing professionally from the Golden Gloves to Latin America. The title comes from a match in Juarez that earns Vaughn’s commentary: “The bad news was that I was the gringo. The good news was that I had not yet become familiar with the Spanish verb ‘to kill.’ ” Later, the author describes meeting a sickly doctor in Panama in the mid-1950s who later became the revolutionary Che Guevara. Republican Vaughn earned the ire of Bobby Kennedy and a “Good going, son!” from his boss, Lyndon Johnson. Occasionally, the author lapses into a listless retelling of his uneven career arc, but there’s enough engaging eyewitness history to make it a worthy read and a textbook for those seeking a career in public service.
You must admire a man whose career advice included, “I often say it’s a gift to be fired at least once,” and “it is always better to be rumored to work for the CIA than to actually be employed there.”Pub Date: April 11, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-945572-17-3
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Vireo/Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2017
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 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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