A well-researched, engagingly human portrait of this complex mid-20th-century political leader.
An absorbing reexamination of Harry Truman’s two-term presidency and the critical years during which he held office.
Much has been written about the 33rd president, whose esteem has increased over the several decades since he left office. His colorful story has become somewhat legendary: the self-educated man from rural Missouri who was thrust into a demanding leadership role following Franklin Roosevelt’s untimely death. Though largely unprepared, Truman rose to the many challenges that confronted him. Among dozens of others, these included the decision to drop the first atomic bombs on Japan to end World War II, the founding of the U.N. and creation of the NATO alliance, and the fateful decision to intervene in the conflict in Korea. Frank, a former senior editor at the New Yorker and author of Ike and Dick: Portrait of a Strange Political Marriage, is also an acclaimed novelist, and his storytelling skills add significantly to this well-documented account. While not quite a revisionist history—the author’s assessment remains mostly consistent with prior biographies, most notably David McCullough’s 1992 Pulitzer-winning Truman—the book provides further depth and nuance to the character dynamics of Truman and his administration, including sharp portraits of James F. Byrnes, George C. Marshall, Dean Acheson, and James Vincent Forrestal, “who was destined to become one of Truman’s unhappiest appointments.” Ultimately, Frank delivers a balanced yet appreciative portrait of a president who, despite his limitations and flaws, proved largely capable of meeting the extraordinary demands of his time. “If he could never replace the masterful Franklin Roosevelt,” writes the author, “he became someone, or something, else: a man, burdened by a persistent absence of foresight, whose policies nonetheless brought stability to an unsteady world….He understood, and cherished, the task he’d been handed, and if he did not always seem big enough for the job, no one could question the size of the decisions he made while he held it.”
A well-researched, engagingly human portrait of this complex mid-20th-century political leader.Pub Date: March 8, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-5011-0289-9
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2021
Lorde’s big heart and fierce mind are at full strength on each page of this deeply personal and deeply political collection.
The groundbreaking Black lesbian writer and activist chronicles her experience with cancer.
In her mid-40s, Lorde (1934-1992) was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a radical mastectomy. Through prose, poems, and selected journal entries beginning six months after the surgery, the author explores the anger, pain, and fear that her illness wrought. Her recovery was characterized by resistance and learning to love her body again. She envisioned herself as a powerful fighter while also examining the connection between her illness and her activism. “There is no room around me in which to be still,” she writes, “to examine and explore what pain is mine alone—no device to separate my struggle within from my fury at the outside world’s viciousness, the stupid brutal lack of consciousness or concern that passes for the way things are. The arrogant blindness of comfortable white women. What is this work all for? What does it matter if I ever speak again or not?” Lorde confronts other tough questions, including the role of holistic and alternative treatments and whether her cancer (and its recurrence) was preventable. She writes of eschewing “superficial spirituality” and repeatedly rejecting the use of prosthesis because it felt like “a lie” at precisely the time she was “seeking new ways of strength and trying to find the courage to tell the truth.” Forty years after its initial publication and with a new foreword by Tracy K. Smith, the collection remains a raw reckoning with illness and death as well as a challenge to the conventional expectations of women with cancer. More universally, Lorde’s rage and the clarity that follows offer us a blueprint for facing our mortality and living boldly in the time we have. This empowering compilation is heartbreaking, beautiful, and timeless.
Lorde’s big heart and fierce mind are at full strength on each page of this deeply personal and deeply political collection.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-14-313520-3
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.
A moving, emotionally charged memoir of the renowned author’s youth in a newly created Israel.
“Almost everyone in Jerusalem in those days,” writes novelist Oz (The Same Sea, 2001, etc.) of the 1940s, “was either a poet or a writer or a researcher or a thinker or a scholar or a world reformer.” Oz’s uncle Joseph Klausner, for instance, kept a 25,000-volume library in every conceivable language, its dusty volumes providing a madeleine for the young writer, “the smell of a silent, secluded life devoted to scholarship,” even as his grandmother contemplated the dusty air of the Levant and concluded that the region was full of germs, whence “a thick cloud of disinfecting spirit, soaps, creams, sprays, baits, insecticides, and powder always hung in the air.” His own father had to sell his beloved books in order to buy food when money was short, though he often returned with more books. (“My mother forgave him, and so did I, because I hardly ever felt like eating anything except sweetcorn and icecream.”) Out in the street, Oz meets a young Palestinian woman who is determined to write great poems in French and English; cats bear such names as Schopenhauer and Chopin; the walls of the city ring with music and learned debate. But then there is the dark side: the war of 1948, with its Arab Legion snipers and stray shells, its heaps of dead new emigrants fresh from the Holocaust. “In Nehemiah Street,” writes Oz, “once there was a bookbinder who had a nervous breakdown, and he went out on his balcony and screamed, Jews, help, hurry, soon they’ll burn us all.” In this heady, dangerous atmosphere, torn by sectarian politics and the constant threat of terror, Oz comes of age, blossoming as a man of letters even as the bookish people of his youth begin to disappear one by one.
A boon for admirers of Oz’s work and contemporary Israeli literature in general.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2004
ISBN: 0-15-100878-7
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2004
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