A stolid account, adding up to a useful reference for future term papers.
Serviceable biography of the obscure functionary who advanced the notion that the president should control what the news was reporting.
Stephen T. Early, an AP wire reporter and man-about-Washington, is little known outside a small circle of FDR scholars; Levin remarks that her inspiration for writing about him originated from a reference in a term paper. Early met FDR at the 1912 Democratic National Convention and was pressed into service first as an advance man in Roosevelt’s vice-presidential bid in the 1920 campaign, and then, after more seasoning, as a press secretary in the 1932 presidential campaign and the subsequent presidency. It is conceivable, Levin writes without much elaboration, that without Early’s help FDR “would have been a one-term president.” It’s true that wealthy newspaper publishers of the Hearst stripe despised and feared FDR as a wild socialist, but there were other determining matters at hand than Early’s use of the press to convey news regularly from the White House. Hitherto FDR had been in the habit of calling reporters individually at all hours to tell favored sources what was going on; now, at Early’s insistence, a single message went forth via press conferences. Levin observes that Early also served as an intermediary among feuding cabinet members, such as Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes and Federal Housing Administrator James A. Moffett. (Early didn’t help, and “the dispute made the headlines.”) Levin notes that during the Depression the public seemed hungry, almost insatiable, for news out of the White House. Early made sure they got it, and usually got it the way the president wanted it, which is the meat of the story. Yet Early’s energetic work was not always successful, particularly when the subjects were thorny, and he lost points in his own time for such things as de facto segregation in the White House press room.
A stolid account, adding up to a useful reference for future term papers.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59102-577-1
Page Count: 500
Publisher: Prometheus Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2007
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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