As this useful volume of powerful prose ably illustrates, what often survives a political collision is moral clarity. (10...
Selections from the writings of two of the foremost antagonists among the Founding Fathers, edited and explained by historian and biographer Cunningham (In Pursuit of Reason, 1987).
Cunningham’s efforts will forever dispel any romantic notions that the Founding Fathers were a troop of amiable Boy Scouts. The Jefferson and Hamilton on display here are fierce opponents, each absolutely convinced that the other was a danger to the fledgling country. Cunningham has juxtaposed some of the principal writings of both men (most of the pieces are excerpts) and supplied some genial commentary—all intended to “reveal how the two leading political figures faced the major issues of their day.” Hamilton (younger than Jefferson by 12 years) did not trust the general public: “The people are turbulent and changing,” he wrote in 1787, “they seldom judge or determine right.” Jefferson, by contrast, had supreme faith in the electorate and wished to guarantee the survival of liberty by improving “the education of the common people.” Cunningham reveals that there is no record of the first meeting between the men, but they both were members of Washington’s first cabinet—Jefferson was Secretary of State, and Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury. Their first important clash was over the formation of the national bank (Hamilton favored it—and won). Jefferson hated Hamilton’s fondness for paper currency and later wrote Washington that he believed he had been “duped” by Hamilton and “made a tool for forwarding his schemes.” Hamilton later called Jefferson “a contemptible hypocrite” and could not bring himself to credit Jefferson even for Louisiana, whose purchase, sniped Hamilton, was due to “fortuitous . . . circumstances” rather than “any wise or vigorous measure.” Cunningham concludes—somewhat superfluously—that “both men contributed greatly to the shaping of the American nation.”
As this useful volume of powerful prose ably illustrates, what often survives a political collision is moral clarity. (10 illustrations)Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-22821-X
Page Count: 202
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2000
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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