An insightful look at a complex relationship that has been largely lost to history.
The portrait of a once-famous, now nearly forgotten figure in 20th-century American politics.
Louis Howe (1871–1936) met Franklin Roosevelt in 1911, when Howe was a newspaper reporter and FDR a freshly minted New York state senator. They became fast friends, and Howe proved to be a pivotal figure in Roosevelt’s life and career. Early on he saw FDR’s enormous potential as a leader, and Roosevelt valued his frank and clear-eyed advice. American Heritage contributor Fenster (The Spirit of Invention: The Story of the Thinkers, Creators, and Dreamers Who Formed Our Nation, 2009, etc.) shows how the friendship grew in importance to both men as the years progressed, especially when FDR hit his lowest point in the 1920s. Roosevelt ran as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee in 1920 and lost; the next year, a mysterious illness (later diagnosed as polio) rendered him paralyzed from the waist down. While many considered this a career-ender, including FDR’s mother, Howe refused to give up. He devoted himself to keeping Roosevelt’s political hopes alive by meeting with potential supporters, writing editorials and attending countless meetings and conventions on FDR’s behalf as he recovered over the next two years. Howe’s devotion, Fenster effectively argues, lessened the burden on Roosevelt and helped give him the will to recover and eventually ascend to the presidency. Eleanor, too, grew close to Howe, and he gave her early advice on speechmaking and handling the press that proved invaluable; she later gained a reputation as a confident and dynamic public speaker. Plagued by lifelong poor health, Howe died of respiratory illness in 1936 during FDR’s first term. Never a man given to expressing his emotions, the president was visibly moved at Howe’s funeral, letting out a gasp and struggling to keep his composure as the casket was lowered into the ground.
An insightful look at a complex relationship that has been largely lost to history.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-230-60910-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
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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