by Jonathan Shaw ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2018
A detailed yet hardly groundbreaking rendering of a significant moment in political history.
A focused history of the period between Election Day 1960 and Inauguration Day 1961.
Market News International congressional reporter Shaw (JFK in the Senate: A Pathway to the Presidency, 2013, etc.) examines the transfer of power between Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy, “sharply contrasting political leaders” and “generational rivals.” Although the orderly transfer of power is a hallmark of American democracy, the author deems this particular transition “a fascinating mix of dutiful cooperation, petty grievances, lofty sentiments, careful organization, ad hoc improvisations, hardball politics, poignant farewells, and elevated public statements.” Eisenhower’s closing down of his administration and Kennedy’s scrambling to form a new one, though, seem not as remarkable as Shaw would have readers believe. Eisenhower was disappointed that his vice president, Richard Nixon, lost the election; he was insulted by Kennedy’s criticism of his presidency and “doubted the senator was ready to be president.” Predictably, Eisenhower felt “protective of his own legacy, ambivalent about retirement, and determined to get his affairs and those of the country in order.” Despite his misgivings about Kennedy, he oversaw a well-organized transfer of power that included two meetings in which Eisenhower apprised Kennedy of problems in Cuba and Laos. Kennedy’s transition period, on the other hand, was messy. Shuttling impetuously between his residences in Hyannis Port, Palm Beach, Washington, D.C., and Manhattan, he surrounded himself with advisers to help him select a Cabinet and huge White House staff (about 1,200 support jobs, in addition to top-level appointments), formulate a policy agenda, and write his inauguration speech. As evidence of the distinction between the two men, Shaw points to the contrast between Kennedy’s inspirational inaugural message and Eisenhower’s farewell speech, in which he warned Americans to be wary of the military-industrial complex. The author prefaces his chronicle of the transition with familiar biographical background of the protagonists and accounts of Nixon’s failed campaign, election-night tensions, Eisenhower’s achievements, and Kennedy’s senatorial record.
A detailed yet hardly groundbreaking rendering of a significant moment in political history.Pub Date: May 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-68177-732-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
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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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SEEN & HEARD
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BOOK TO SCREEN
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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