by Joan Sullivan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2002
Missteps aside: an energetic new voice that can both sing sweetly and sigh bitterly.
Swift and often affecting debut memoir about the author’s experiences working for Bill Bradley’s 2000 presidential campaign.
Looking back on her months with Bradley, from the optimism of Iowa to the death wounds of Super Tuesday, Sullivan writes, “I don’t think I was a cynic when I started and I don’t think I am a cynic now, but somewhere in between I learned what it is to hate.” Objects of her hatred include the media and Al Gore. She believes the former set unrealistic expectations for Bradley and then dismissed him when he failed to meet them; she views the latter as an unprincipled mannequin. (The slender, not-yet-30 former college athlete also reveals in several places a disdain for people who are older and overweight, calling one person, for example, “a big, fat middle-aged man.”) Like many other novice writers, the author is not certain what is common knowledge, what is not. So she tells us that John Steinbeck wrote Travels with Charley and identifies the Holland Tunnel and Cornel West. She also drops into her text some obtrusive quotations from Richard Hofstadter, George Orwell, and others. Still, she displays in numerous places a fresh phrase, a sharp eye, and keen ear as she describes her undying affection for Bradley and her round-the-clock schedule of planning campaign events in unfamiliar Iowa, dealing with the hated media, skirmishing with a pushy Secret Service agent, eating inedible food, trying to anticipate (and counter) the moves of the Gore team, and suffering from exhaustion so deep that one of her sisters barely recognizes her when they meet near the end of the campaign. Most touching of all are memories of her father, who died in 1994 of pancreatic cancer, interwoven with and contrasted to Bradley’s moribund campaign.
Missteps aside: an energetic new voice that can both sing sweetly and sigh bitterly.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-58234-201-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 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
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