Altogether, a pleasing memoir, with many lessons in practical leadership and public duty.
A business executive and diplomat recalls a long life of service, including recent work, post-9/11, as head of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation.
Whitehead grew up in the Depression, a matter he revisits late in his account, when, as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank, he warns that the stock market bubble of the mid-1990s “could lead only to one result: a terrible crash.” Headed for a career as a college admissions officer, Whitehead opted for business instead, just when WWII broke out. Trained as a naval accountant, he found himself commanding a landing craft at D-Day. It’s conceivable that memories of the event helped mold Whitehead’s career as a diplomat, though he makes no such stretch here; having earned many fortunes as a financier, he served diligently in the Reagan administration as deputy secretary of state under George Schultz, and, Whitehead relates, he made it a special project to open up Eastern Europe in rather the same spirit as Nixon opened up China to American diplomacy. His insistence that the State Department consider the nations of the Soviet bloc to be “differentiated”—that is, still distinct and individual—was met by considerable resistance on the part of National Security Council hardliners; particularly implacable was an old Wall Street rival, Don Regan, though Nancy Reagan was even more formidable after Whitehead publicly disagreed with the president during the Irangate mess. He scored a victory over the hardliners when, he relates, he convinced Reagan to pay up on belated dues to the United Nations—which he adds, George H.W. Bush undid, bowing once again to the right wing. (Reading between the lines, one might conclude that Whitehead has small regard for any Bush except the unrelated Vannevar.) Whitehead closes by describing the work he has done to rebuild Lower Manhattan, accomplished in part by some very shrewd dealings with residents and businesspeople who are now helping the area flourish anew.
Altogether, a pleasing memoir, with many lessons in practical leadership and public duty.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-465-05054-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2005
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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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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