Impossible for admirers of the current president to dismiss, the Cannons’ detailed reporting, fluid style and mature...
Leading Reagan biographer Cannon (Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power, 2003, etc.) teams with son Carl (The Pursuit of Happiness in Times of War, 2003, etc.) to measure George W. Bush against the Gipper’s formidable shadow.
During the course of his successful political career, Ronald Reagan renovated the Republican Party, a transformation neatly replicated in miniature within the Bush family. Any Republican seriously aspiring to the Oval Office since 1988 has welcomed and sought comparisons to Reagan, no one more aggressively than the current occupant. As Bush’s beleaguered presidency winds down, the Cannons deem him a worthy heir to Reagan on matters of tax and economic policies, judicial appointments and immigration issues. Otherwise, Bush shrivels in comparison to the Great Communicator. Where Reagan was flexible but aggressive, ruthless when necessary, attuned to public opinion and optimistic, Bush is stubborn, excessively loyal, passive and oddly indifferent to public opinion. Mindful of Reagan’s failures in office, the authors, nevertheless, find none as egregious as the Iraq War, a conflict they conclude Reagan would have avoided, and one which will likely doom Bush’s legacy. The Cannons detail how it all went wrong for Bush and how he strayed from the Reagan blueprint. Their narrative is distinguishable in three important ways from the innumerable Bush-bashing tomes that populate the bookshelves. First, the authors forthrightly confess that today’s world moves rapidly and that events might still overtake the analysis they offer. Second, they avoid the hysterical, foaming-at-the-mouth tone that assessments of Bush often inspire. Third, they acknowledge the rich irony of using Reagan to hammer Bush, a favorite pastime of folks who had little use for the Californian while he was governing.
Impossible for admirers of the current president to dismiss, the Cannons’ detailed reporting, fluid style and mature judgment will particularly delight Bush’s many critics.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-58648-448-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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