A bare-bones summary that is even shorter and somewhat less eloquent than Louis Auchincloss’ Roosevelt bio (2002) in the...
A very brief resource on the life of Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919).
Gould (American History Emeritus/Univ. of Texas; The Most Exclusive Club: A History of the Modern United States Senate, 2005, etc.) extracts significantly from his previous pertinent works on Roosevelt, Taft and the Progressive era. The character depicted here is one of decisive action, charisma and accidental fame (his accelerating celebrity status served his causes as naturalist and reformer). Underestimated early in his career by the Republican Party he tirelessly stumped for, he eventually secured GOP appointments in Benjamin Harrison’s Civil Service Commission, then as President McKinley’s assistant secretary of the Navy in 1897. Contrary to later mythmaking, Roosevelt “did not bring on the war” with Spain over the Philippines, but he embraced the hostilities enthusiastically. His Rough Riders’ valiant efforts to take the San Juan Heights in Cuba gained him enormous acclaim at home, paving the way for two years as New York governor and making him the attractive vice-presidential choice for McKinley. Using the “bully pulpit” of the now-renamed White House, his Square Deal instituted sweeping reforms such as breaking up monopolies, mediating with striking miners, acquiring the Panama Canal Zone, ensuring government regulation in the Pure Food and Drug Act, including women in the democratic process and conserving the natural world from degradation. His years after the White House were largely spent planning how to get back in, and his Progressive Party platform of 1912 laid out an agenda “that was far more reformist than that of any Democratic or Republican presidential nominees until the New Deal.”
A bare-bones summary that is even shorter and somewhat less eloquent than Louis Auchincloss’ Roosevelt bio (2002) in the Times/Holt presidential series.Pub Date: Jan. 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-19-979701-1
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2011
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
