by Leonard Garment ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 1, 1997
The exuberant, worldly-wise autobiography of a Washington/Wall Street insider who thrived despite the hard blows life has dealt him on more than one occasion. A product of Brooklyn, Garment (who turned 72 in May) does not recall his comfortable childhood with any particular fondness. Indeed, he left home early to pursue a career as a clarinet/saxophone player in jazz bands. Released from the WW II army for medical reasons within weeks of induction, Garment turned his back on music and earned a law degree; his academic record was good enough to land him a coveted job with the Waspy Manhattan firm of Mudge, Stern, Williams, and Tucker. A partner by the time Richard Nixon joined the fold in 1963, the self-styled ``ethnic icebreaker'' soon became a close friend of the former vice president's. An important member of the team that helped put him in the White House, Garment became an all-purpose troubleshooter for Nixon. The tough-talking administration's informal envoy to both US Jewry and Israel, Garment (who characterizes his ex-boss as operationally progressive but rhetorically retrogressive on social issues) also worked on civil-rights programs. Garment was untainted by Watergate, on which he comments with perception and compassion. He eventually returned to New York City. With time out to serve as Daniel Patrick Moynihan's special assistant for human rights during his stint as US ambassador to the UN, he resumed the practice of law. While personal tragedies (including the suicide of his first wife) took a toll, the resilient Garment bounced back. Happily remarried, with a new young daughter to raise, the globe-trotting attorney is again ensconced in Washington with a world-class clientele. The engaging, often ingratiating, recollections of a free- spirited agent and advocate who has learned a lot from his varied experiences close to the seats of power. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: March 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8129-2887-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1997
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
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 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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