by John Dickerson ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 17, 2006
A fascinating, if somewhat distant, portrait of a cultural icon who happened to also be a mom.
Slate.com political correspondent Dickerson explores his mother’s complicated legacy.
In the 1960s, Nancy Dickerson was one of America’s favorite reporters, rising to TV stardom with a combination of Christiane Amanpour’s reporting skills, Katie Couric’s charm and Jackie O’s sophisticated good looks. Her son attributes Nancy’s success in the male preserve of broadcast journalism to hard work and charisma. Born Nancy Hanschman in 1927, she studied with a speech coach and endeared herself to leading Washington hostesses, who taught her the art of scintillating conversation. An affair with Congressman Ken Keating also greased a few wheels; the author believes the rumors of affairs with JFK and LBJ were false. She married widower Wyatt Dickerson in 1962; John was born in 1968. As a mother, Nancy occupied the large middle ground between Joan Crawford and Carol Brady. She gained only ten pounds when pregnant—“No wonder I had to go to all those doctors in adolescence. She starved me,” John writes with a touch of both humor and pathos, referring to more than just food. Her son doesn’t dwell on Nancy-as-feminist-role-model: He’s sympathetic to the sexism that dogged her, yet he raises some subtle questions about her tactics for breaking through the glass ceiling. Going back to work two weeks after giving birth provided a model for other women that was, in his view, “stoic, but not very helpful.” John’s narrative sometimes moves from his mother’s reporting in the 1960s to his own experiences in the same profession. The chapter on Nancy’s coverage of JFK’s assassination, for example, ends with his recollections of covering the disappearance of John Jr.’s plane over Martha’s Vineyard 36 years later. But these autobiographical touches are basically asides; John writes principally as a journalist digging up the facts about Nancy’s life, and at times, one wishes he would open up a bit more about his own feelings.
A fascinating, if somewhat distant, portrait of a cultural icon who happened to also be a mom.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-8783-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
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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 Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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