Though well-researched and engagingly presented, Peraino’s materials include too little new information about Lincoln to add...
In his workmanlike debut, veteran journalist Peraino examines Abraham Lincoln’s role in American foreign policy, “one of the few sparsely stocked corners of an otherwise massive library.”
As is well-known, Lincoln was occupied with pressing domestic matters for his entire administration and largely left the conduct of foreign policy to Secretary of State William Seward. As president, Lincoln had only two overriding foreign policy goals: to keep the nation out of wars with foreign powers and to keep other nations from recognizing the Confederacy. Even the first of these was difficult, as there was a widely held notion that a foreign war might help resolve the Civil War, and public opinion was inflamed by several international crises during this period. These included a clash with Great Britain over the Trent Affair and the French invasion of Mexico in support of the puppet emperor Maximilian. Peraino treats both at length, crediting Lincoln with encouraging journalists to prepare the public for a necessary but embarrassing climb-down over Trent. Discouraging foreign intervention in our own war, particularly by Britain, where thousands of textile workers were idled by a cotton shortage, required further subtle skill. The author argues that it was accomplished in large part by Lincoln’s gradual transition to emancipation as a war goal, which had a greater moral appeal to the European public than preserving a union that tolerated slavery. This was an approach advanced by, among others, Karl Marx, London correspondent for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Finally, however, it detracts nothing from Lincoln’s glory to observe that the author’s view of him as “one of America’s seminal foreign-policy presidents” is something of a stretch. Peraino never fully brings into focus the contours of a distinctly Lincolnian foreign policy.
Though well-researched and engagingly presented, Peraino’s materials include too little new information about Lincoln to add much to readers’ understanding of the 16th president.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-307-88720-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2013
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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