Readable approach to a significant aspect of presidential history that doesn’t always receive the treatment it deserves.
Lively yet overly detailed chronicle of the different paths various presidents have taken once they left the White House.
New York Times contributors Benardo and Weiss (co-authors: Brooklyn by Name, 2006) describe how different chief executives found ways to serve their country—and bank accounts—after their tenure in the nation’s top job. Timed to coincide with the addition of George W. Bush to the Former Presidents’ Club, the book’s narrative style makes it appealing to both general readers and history geeks. While some stories of recent vintage are well known, such as Jimmy Carter’s humanitarian efforts and election monitoring or Bill Clinton’s foundation and lucrative speaking career, the authors shed much light on earlier presidents. They deal at great length with Herbert Hoover’s work as chairman of a commission on government reorganization and John Quincy Adams’s efforts as an abolitionist congressman and defender of the enslaved Africans who mutinied on the Amistad. Benardo and Weiss rarely break new ground, but they admirably synthesize information from disparate sources. Extensively discussing Clinton’s outspoken and sometimes controversial efforts on behalf of his wife during the 2008 Democratic primaries, they clearly think that his actions besmirched the prestige of the presidency. The authors also spend a great deal of time discussing the history and workings of presidential libraries. These efforts by presidents to help shape their legacies have evolved into elaborate public-private ventures. Benardo and Weiss argue that there should be more rigorous scholarship when administering the libraries and more disclosure about donors. “Transparency in such library contributions would help citizens assess whether corporate donations or sovereign governments’ gifts influence a president’s policies,” they write. “A detailed federal budget exists for what taxpayers are providing to presidential libraries across America. Why not demand the same for private contributions?”
Readable approach to a significant aspect of presidential history that doesn’t always receive the treatment it deserves.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-124496-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2008
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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