Raw-edged honesty at its most revealing and intense.
A noted African-American journalist’s account of his hardscrabble youth and its consequences in later life.
Poet, journalist, and essayist Powell (Barack Obama, Ronald Reagan, and the Ghost of Dr. King, 2012, etc.) grew up the son of a struggling single mother who dreamed he would become “somebody important.” Though loving and encouraging, his mother was also ferociously strict and often beat Powell to keep him on the straight and narrow. Between her brutality and the poverty and violence he faced in the New Jersey ghettos where he grew up, Powell felt as though he were living in a “concrete box” from which there was no escape. Despite the many obstacles he faced and his flirtation with a life of petty crime, he still excelled academically. Yet his suppressed rage and sadness often erupted at unexpected moments and led to arrests and his expulsion from high school. Powell still managed to gain tuition-free acceptance into Rutgers University, where he became involved with black student activists. After the university suspended him for pulling a knife on a fellow student in a fit of frustration, Powell left for New York determined to make a living as a writer. His experiments in poetry and journalism eventually led to a job writing about hip-hop music and culture for Vibe. But his anger at working for two white editors at a black magazine caused him to eventually be fired. Powell’s life spiraled into an abyss of alcoholism, depression, and dysfunctional relationships, one of which ended after he physically attacked his lover. After two unsuccessful runs for Congress, Powell went to Africa, where he finally began to experience personal healing. The author’s story is powerful and unsparing. By the end, his narrative bears witness not only to the life of one black man, but to an American society still bound to a tragic history of racism.
Raw-edged honesty at its most revealing and intense.Pub Date: Nov. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4391-6368-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
Despite its many virtues, this memoir is simply too idiosyncratically detailed to be of general interest.
A veteran lawyer recounts his decision to return to school to earn a doctorate in law.
At 72, after about 45 years of practicing as a lawyer, Hopkins (Nonprofit Governance: Law, Practices, and Trends, 2009) made a decision that bewildered and frustrated his colleagues: He went back to school. He had already obtained the only two other academic degrees in law available: a JD and an LLM, the equivalent of a master’s. In pursuit of his dream, he enrolled at the University of Kansas Law School, where he was teaching a course as an adjunct (it sometimes happened that a student or two was also a classmate). Hopkins’ charming remembrance splits into two narrative threads: his career as a lawyer before his decision to return to school and his coursework in pursuit of the doctorate. His professional life is a study in the marriage of disciplined hard work and happenstance. He was tasked by his employer with keeping notes on the congressional hearings devoted to the Tax Reform Act of 1969, which not only led to his legal specialization, but also opportunities to teach, lecture, and publish. (Hopkins has written more than 30 books.) He provides an excruciatingly detailed account of the coursework he completed prior to his dissertation work as well as a minute account of the dissertation itself. The author graduated in 2016 and includes written sentiments from friends and colleague as well as poem (of sorts) reflecting on the experience in its completion. Hopkins is an experienced writer, and so it’s no surprise that his prose is consistently clear, though it’s also companionably informal and lighthearted. It’s not clear to whom this recollection is addressed—while his unusual experience is likely to be instructive and inspiring to other lawyers, the microscopic account of his coursework won’t win wide appeal. He quotes his course textbooks frequently and seems driven by a desire to achieve exhaustive comprehensiveness more than readability. Some will find his reasons for his peculiar decision wanting as well—he wanted a challenge—especially given its centrality to the book.
Despite its many virtues, this memoir is simply too idiosyncratically detailed to be of general interest.Pub Date: May 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4809-6044-2
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: June 21, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An estimable biography that portrays Truman, the patron saint of beleaguered pols, as an ordinary American but an extraordinary president. As narrative, this biography cannot begin to compete with David McCullough's Truman (1992). However, historian Ferrell (Indiana Univ., Bloomington; Ill-Advised, 1992, etc.) partly makes up for this with his mastery of Truman sources (he has written or edited eight previous books on the president) and his shrewd analysis of the workings of executive power. He shows how Truman, with his Missouri twang and his background as the product of Kansas City's Pendergast machine, seemed smaller than life, even grubby, compared to the patrician FDR. But he believes that Truman surpassed his predecessor in decisiveness, veracity, and stamina. Unpretentious and optimistic, Truman was temperamentally well equipped to lead the nation as it was being challenged by communism abroad. Yet Truman, now one of our most beloved presidents, saw his approval rating dip to only 23% a year before he left office—one point lower than Richard Nixon's when he resigned. Ferrell attributes this at least partly to depleted energy, but other factors may have come into play, such as his loyalty to corrupt cronies, a GOP congressional bloc that saw the opportunity to gain political capital by Red-baiting, and his method of dealing solely with a few congressional leaders. Ferrell's portrait differs significantly in only two ways from the current wisdom: He portrays a president who thought more deeply, both before and long after the fact, about the ramifications of dropping the atomic bomb than he is generally given credit for; and he makes a bigger issue of Truman's addition of his wife, Bess, to his senatorial payroll (an ethical lapse that he feared would doom his chances for the vice presidency in 1944). An incisive study of a gutsy underdog who rose to the occasion.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8262-0953-X
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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