Ronald Reagan's rise from lifeguard and sportscaster to movie star, governor and president, seen through the eyes of a fan.
Morrell (Shackleton’s Way, 2001) presents the former president as the man of many mentors, maker of countless speeches and endlessly cultivated contacts, with boundless positivism as he worked his way up from Midwestern obscurity. The author, briefly a staffer, is clearly still in Reagan's thrall and cannot write a disparaging word about the man. At worst, he had a bad day, as in the first presidential debate with Walter Mondale. At his best, he learned to perfectly elucidate what was in the hearts and minds of his broad base of supporters, always with an eye on the crowd to see what played. Morrell is most at home describing her subject's formative years, and his eventual branding of himself as the affable and ever-positive leader with steely American convictions. The presidential years fly by in a maze of Swiss-cheese history, with whole epochs ignored or barely mentioned. The most historically enduring Reagan utterance, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall," pops up with little context. Always the Gipper abided, and then with a smart salute exited the public stage from its pinnacle. Each chapter ends, somewhat jarringly, with a self-questionnaire to help readers emulate the Reagan method. This may provide difficult for those who lack his charisma and oratorical perfect pitch. Fodder for ardent admirers of the former president; otherwise, slim pickings.
Pub Date: May 3, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4516-2085-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Threshold Editions/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2011
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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