An exhaustive, nicely done biography of the late Idaho senator Frank Church, whose four terms (1957-81) ran from the beginning of the Cold War to the post-Vietnam era. A liberal Democrat who ``resembled a rejuvenated New Dealer,'' Church represented an extremely conservative and Republican state. Ashby (History/Washington State Univ.) and journalist Gramer note that even though he developed considerable national clout, Church was always fighting for survival back home. Elected at age 32, he was one of the youngest senators in US history. His role in passing the 1957 Civil Rights Act, by supporting the removal of a section deemed too liberal by some, gave early notice that Church would ``balance his idealistic impulses with political realities.'' But this ``tendency to compromise,'' write Ashby and Gramer, ``also provided the basis for criticism that followed him'' throughout his career. The keynote speaker at the 1960 Democratic National Convention, Church helped usher in the ``new liberalism'' of the Kennedy administration. His ardent sponsorship of wilderness- preservation legislation alienated Idaho big business, and his emerging role as a Senate ``dove'' during the 1960s spurred a right-wing backlash that culminated in a nearly successful recall movement in 1967. He survived, according to the authors, by politicking against gun-control legislation in his state. He defied his own party's president on the war in Southeast Asia, and it was his bipartisan Cooper-Church amendment that—on paper, at least- -prohibited the use of ground troops in Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. He achieved national recognition when he chaired committees investigating the CIA and ITT's manipulation of the Chilean elections and, later, looking into the ``profits from Pentagon-sponsored export sales'' garnered by weapons manufacturers Lockheed and Northrop. While overtly pro-Church, this is nonetheless a fine examination of the fate of New Deal liberalism, its role in the Cold War, and its failure to stand up to what the authors call the ``growing power of the New Right.''
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-87422-103-X
Page Count: 792
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
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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