An architect, indeed, in the Speerian sense—and that’s no hyperbole. So the reader, sobered and astonished, might well...
A none-too-adulatory study of the man who has been called Bush’s Brain, “American politics’ most talented, prolific, and successful dissembler.”
Karl Rove’s middle name is Christian, and his favorite constituency is Christian, the farther right the better. And yet, TV correspondent Moore and Dallas Morning News political writer Slater reveal, Rove “once told a colleague that he had no religious affiliation and was ‘not a Christian.’ ” Still, perhaps mindful of Lenin’s praise for “useful idiots,” the cynical self-described genius recognized that in the Christian right—and in such underappreciated new phenomena as the mega-churches mushrooming across the land—lay the ground troops for his dream of one-party rule. The party, of course, would be the Republicans, who had once been dominant for half-a-century and could be made to be dominant even longer thanks to the charms of such Roverian dreamboats as Ronald Reagan and George Bush. Possessing a bookie’s knowledge of stats and trends, Rove masterminded every aspect of Bush’s 2000 and 2004 elections, good and bad, using whatever means necessary to divide the enemy, usurp their message, convince supporters that the enemy was an agent of satanic forces—whence such infamous wedge issues as gay marriage, which turn out to be meaningful to just enough of a conservative fringe to settle elections in many a district. It is illuminating to learn that Rove, quite apart from disdaining “the base,” may have certain feelings about gay people because of personal history; it is still more illuminating to know that the GOP’s leadership subscribes to the view of Rove’s own mentor, Michael Ledeen, who, the authors report, once remarked that the president may be excused if he should “enter into evil whenever the very existence of the nation is threatened.” Thus Abramoff, and Iraq, and . . .
An architect, indeed, in the Speerian sense—and that’s no hyperbole. So the reader, sobered and astonished, might well conclude.Pub Date: Sept. 5, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-23792-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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