Altogether excellent, and essential for understanding the birth of America’s empire.
The biography of a vast building that “came to possess agency—the capacity to act in ways that transcended the wills and purposes of the people who claimed responsibility for the Defense Department at any given time.”
National Book Award–winner Carroll (Crusade, 2004, etc.) grew up in the shadow of the Pentagon, the son of an Air Force general; like many military brats of his generation, he dreamed of taking his place there one day, then found himself outside, protesting war and aggression. His book tells three interwoven stories. The first is the history of the building itself, constructed as a military annex during WWII; its groundbreaking took place, eerily enough, on Sept. 11, 1941, 60 years to the day and nearly the minute when American Airlines flight 77 would crash into its south wall. The second strand is the history of the military-industrial complex that the great building would inspire; by Carroll’s careful account, the place seems to have legitimated a culture born in WWII that dismissed as standard operating procedure the targeting of civilian populations for military ends, the active intervention in the affairs of sovereign nations in order to maintain American suzerainty. Two hallmark moments in this amoral history, when the military became a fist of civilian policy that threatened sometimes to overwhelm the body, occurred on Sept. 11: one in 1973, when American-trained and -backed forces overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile, the other in 1990, when George H.W. Bush declared the existence of the “new world order . . . [whose] purpose his son would attempt to fulfill, beginning exactly eleven years later.” The third element of this grand narrative is Carroll’s own story, a life marked by gruff nods from Curtis LeMay and the eventual distancing from a father whose ideals his son no longer shared.
Altogether excellent, and essential for understanding the birth of America’s empire.Pub Date: May 16, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-18780-4
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2006
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.
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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