More than serviceable, but best for readers of conservative views themselves. Others will want to turn to more critical...
An admiring biography of the Iron Lady by a former “Tory back-bencher” who played a role in her government.
Admiring it is, but Aitken’s (Pride and Perjury: An Autobiography, 2003, etc.) life of Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) is not entirely uncritical, even if he finds reasons to excuse behavior that left “bullied colleagues, derided officials, ignored communities and neglected family members” in its wake. Thatcher, writes the author, was ambitious from the very start, running into trouble with a headmistress for having had the upstart hubris to declare that she was aiming for a career in the Indian Foreign Service, since it was a fast track to political fame back home. Alas for Thatcher, India got away from Britain before she could hitch her wagon to it, and so she had to slog it out with the rest of the back bench. Mainly, Aitken writes with the exquisite carefulness of the true believer: “Although Denis’s proposal was accepted by Margaret with the full consent of her parents, the engagement was kept secret for another five weeks for political reasons.” Those political reasons, it seems, were so profound that they occasioned this doubly passive construction. In the tightest of controversies, Aitken accords Thatcher some responsibility for bad faith but places more on others: Breaking the unions in the early 1980s was mostly the fault of militant union leaders, even if Thatcher could have done better; the Falklands War was mostly the fault of the Argentines, even if her “stubbornness…and her inexperience in foreign affairs” had something to do with the mess. But mostly, Aitken is deferential and even a little star-struck, especially in the presence of Ronald Reagan, he of “good looks, good humour and good conservative views.”
More than serviceable, but best for readers of conservative views themselves. Others will want to turn to more critical commentators.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62040-342-6
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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
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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