Fourth and below-par volume of Davis's ongoing biography of FDR (1986, etc.), this entry covering 1936-40. Davis presents an uncomplimentary view of FDR's second term, seeing the unprecedented electoral victory of 1936 as having created a disastrous hubris in the President, and he presses this thesis in a long opening section on FDR's attempt to enlarge a conservative Supreme Court that had frustrated New Deal legislation. Section titles suggest both Davis's views and his wordy, rhetorical writing: ``Initiation and Anatomy of a Tragic Error''; ``Tragic Error is Compounded by a Stubborn Persistence in It,'' etc. FDR's waffling on the Spanish Civil War, his running battle with Supreme Court chief justice Charles Evans Hughes, and the recession of 1937 are well presented, but the President's mistakes and sometimes vindictive treatment of political enemies are covered with insufficient consideration of the fragility of FDR's political coalition, the resurgent strength of the financial/industrial establishment, and the inevitable letdown of second terms. And Davis's claim to understand the interior world of this sophisticated patrician and wily statesman doesn't wash: A statement like ``[FDR's] mandate was not only popular, it was also, in his own perception, divine...'' doesn't really help us to grasp Roosevelt. Moreover, the context (i.e., national catastrophe) isn't fully present; if Roosevelt overreached, he did so with unique support from the people. Balance demands that FDR be explained as more than a politician who did ``nothing save drift with the tide of circumstances,'' lacked both decisiveness about the atom bomb and the ability to accomplish what he wished in foreign affairs, and convinced himself that God was telling him what to do. Somehow the electorate accepted FDR's version of reality: Hitler was confronted, Lindbergh was faced down, the Court was tamed, destroyers got to England, and the Bomb was built. The means by which all this occurred are not explained here.
Pub Date: March 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-41541-6
Page Count: 736
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1992
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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