Selective but effectively tart recollections of a hectic decade as a spokesman for the Reagan and Bush administrations. When President Reagan's press secretary, Larry Speakes, left government at the start of 1987, Fitzwater, a Kansas farm boy turned government press officer, was hired away from the Treasury Department to replace him and stayed on by invitation during the Bush era. Eschewing chronology in favor of a format that allows him to probe major topics at some length, the author also forgoes recaps of the Panama invasion and Persian Gulf War (on grounds these events deserve and will get more detailed treatment in other books). He does provide anecdotal takes on the White House press corps (liberal to a fault, in his informed opinion), the awesome mechanics of daily briefings wherever in the world the president may be, a series of summit conferences (including the tempest- tossed sessions held on warships offshore Malta), and how chiefs of staff (Donald Regan, Sam Skinner, John Sununu) are sacked. Covered as well are media relations during periods when a chief executive's health commands international attention, how the fourth estate and the White house spin breaking or running stories, and the genuinely feckless reelection campaign run by Bush forces. Along his engaging way, Fitzwater (who caused a global stir when with malice aforethought he referred to Mikhail Gorbachev as a drugstore cowboy) settles some old scores with individual reporters and news- gathering organizations. Among others, he taxes Mike Wallace and William Safire for feeding ``the fires of [the Iran-Contra] scandal'' and faults Dan Rather's minions, whose ongoing enmity presumably reflected the grudge held by their boss in the wake of a 1988 confrontation with Bush on prime-time TV. In brief, then, an experienced, professional communicator's illuminating, behind-the-scenes insights on how American chief executives make and shape the news. (8 pages b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8129-2296-4
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Times/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1995
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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