A long but excellent, highly useful addition to the library of modern European history as well as the political history of...
Nearly 50 years after his death comes this exhaustive biography and reassessment of Charles de Gaulle’s political career.
As Jackson (History/Queen Mary Univ.; The Fall of France: The Nazi Invasion of 1940, 2003, etc.) notes, de Gaulle was not easy to peg politically. He emerged from a tradition of “social Catholicism” that “sought to overcome class struggle by finding a middle way between capitalism and socialism.” What de Gaulle was, pre-eminently, was French, fervently devoted to his nation. During World War I, he had been a junior officer under Marshal Pétain, whom he would oppose when France capitulated to the Germans at the beginning of World War II; Pétain’s role, de Gaulle thundered, put him “on the road to treason.” De Gaulle evacuated to London and set up a Free French government in exile, and he was so much of a thorn in the side of the Allies in demanding an equal place at the table that Jackson writes Churchill said something along the lines of, “Each time I have to choose between you and Roosevelt, I will choose Roosevelt.” Yet, because of de Gaulle, France did have an equal part as an occupying power of Germany after the war. Jackson writes clearly, if sometimes with a touch too much lingering detail, of de Gaulle’s maneuvering to play both sides against the middle in such instances as the near civil war that broke out in France over the anti-colonial war in Algeria, which nearly led to a modern coup d’état, and of de Gaulle’s elaborate efforts to calve the European powers away from American influence and into the French sphere. Throughout, Jackson insists, de Gaulle, though often considered conservative, was a modernizer who “celebrated scientific progress, economic and social reforms and the modernization of the armed forces.”
A long but excellent, highly useful addition to the library of modern European history as well as the political history of World War II and the Cold War.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-674-98721-0
Page Count: 944
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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