A readable account of the intersection of Lincoln and Douglass’s careers, but an even better demonstration of the interplay...
A sharp analysis by Oakes (History/City University of New York; Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South, 1998, etc.) of how Lincoln the politician and Douglass the reformer worked, separately and together, to abolish slavery in America.
The pair met only three times, but President Lincoln’s esteem for the most famous ex-slave in the nation prompted him to conspicuously welcome “my friend Douglass” to the White House. After the assassination, Mary Lincoln sent the martyr’s walking stick to Douglass as a memento and an expression of the president’s personal regard. Thirty years later, after a lifetime of working first against slavery and then against legal discrimination, and after many revisions of opinion, Douglass came to see Lincoln as a kind of saint. Oakes’s narrative focuses on the fascinating symbiosis between these two highly public men as each worked in his own way towards a common goal, but it’s also a brilliant meditation on the timeless, crucial roles played by the radical and the politician to resolve any public issue, especially one as contentious as slavery in 19th-century America. Almost from the time of his escape from bondage, the uncommonly eloquent Douglass was on the forefront of the abolitionist movement. As his career progressed, and though he never deviated from his goal, he moved gradually and not always consistently from contempt for the political process to grudging appreciation to active participation. Though he always opposed slavery, such was Lincoln’s caution on the subject that Douglass declined to vote for him in 1860. In Douglass’s opinion, Lincoln never moved swiftly or decisively enough, the classic complaint of any activist about political leaders forced to accommodate multiple interests. Lincoln, however, was a consummate politician, able to take advantage of events and perfectly gauge the public mood. In the White House, he moved to eradicate slavery even as he achieved his principal goal of saving the Union.
A readable account of the intersection of Lincoln and Douglass’s careers, but an even better demonstration of the interplay between the agendas of passionate, single-minded reformers who prepare the public for change, and the talented politicians who master the art of the possible.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2007
ISBN: 0-393-06194-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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