In an important contribution to Cold War scholarship, Bill (Government/Coll. of William and Mary) traces the foreign policy career of ``wise man'' George Ball from the 1940s until his death in 1994. Bill briefly outlines Ball's upbringing as the intellectually precocious son of a midwestern oil executive, his largely dysfunctional marriage and relationship with his two sons, and his role as counsel to the wartime Lend-Lease program and the US Strategic Bombing Survey, among other aspects of his long career. Avoiding the sweep of a full biography, however, the author focuses primarily on Ball's policy preoccupations and accomplishments: his concern with European political integration, his strong involvement in Democratic Party affairs (especially in his friend Adlai Stevenson's two presidential campaigns), and his service in the State Department under presidents Kennedy and Johnson. The author analyzes in detail Ball's role in several major foreign-policy case studies: European integration (he and friend Jean Monnet did more than anyone else to bring the European Community into being), US involvement in the Congo and Vietnam, and crises in Cuba, Cyprus, and the Middle East. Ball was often eerily prescient. He strongly favored British entry into the Common Market decades before it happened, advocated a tunnel between Britain and France before the ``Chunnel'' was on anyone's drawing board, and vigorously opposed US involvement in Vietnam as a disaster almost from its inception. Many criticized Ball, however, for remaining loyal to the administration during the deepening Vietnam crisis despite his strong feelings against the war; he resigned quietly in September 1966 and refrained from publicly criticizing Johnson for the escalating bombing campaign. After leaving the State Department, Ball continued to exert influence as a private citizen on such issues as the Middle East crisis. Bill concludes that because of his extraordinary prudence, characterized by pragmatic idealism, Ball was the quintessential American statesman, one whose career stands as a model for 21st- century statecraft.
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-300-06969-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1997
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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