Half a century later, Lee Harvey Oswald’s bullets still reverberate, as Sabato (Politics/Univ. of Virginia; Pendulum Swing, 2012, etc.) recounts in this thoughtful consideration of John Kennedy’s life and afterlife.
The author provides a smart précis of JFK’s political career, which had plenty of odd moments: his taking on the followers of the Protestant positive-thinking guru Norman Vincent Peale, for instance, which tied in to the anti-Catholic prejudices of the day, and his subsequent decision to “reduce the impact of the religious issue by going into the lion’s den” to speak before a convention of evangelical ministers. Yet Sabato’s greater interest is to examine the events of November 22, 1963, and their effects. No breathless conspiracy theorist, he nonetheless offers plenty of fuel for readers who subscribe to the notion that Oswald was not alone. Why, unlike Lyndon Johnson’s vehicle, did a Secret Service agent not ride on the rear bumper of JFK’s car? Doing so would alone have blocked Oswald’s shot. The central point of the book comes midway, when Sabato writes, “It has taken fifty years to see part of the truth clearly. John F. Kennedy’s assassination might have been almost inevitable.” Sabato hazards the view that, of Kennedy’s many enemies, one who particularly wanted to see him dead was Jimmy Hoffa, the labor leader, who speculated about shooting the president somewhere in the segregationist Deep South. Ronald Reagan, for his part, laid out the “case for a Communist conspiracy” by observing both Oswald’s connections to Cuba and the Soviet Union and the fact that in 1962, the Cold War went close to becoming dangerously hot. Whatever the case, Kennedy served at a time of considerable danger to any president, with a roiling civil rights crisis, religious prejudice, a fraught international climate and “a shockingly casual approach to presidential security.”
Provocative reading for this semicentennial year.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-62040-280-1
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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BOOK REVIEW
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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE
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