An eventful, stylish, sometimes painful memoir by right-wing agitator Liebman. Liebman grew up in Brooklyn as a youthful Communist. But when his hero, onetime Communist Party (USA) chairman Earl Browder, was purged, he turned to the right; and when news of Soviet labor camps broke, Liebman started using techniques he'd learned from the left to mobilize Republicans. He founded Young Americans for Freedom, and the Committee of One Million, which kept Communist China out of the UN for almost 20 years. Liebman is gay, and his story is in large part about his struggle to accept his sexual orientation. In 1990, he ``came out'' in the pages of his friend William F. Buckley's National Review. Here, Liebman expresses deep concern that, with the collapse of the Soviet Union, conservatives are increasingly turning to ``hate politics''—including gay-bashing— to polarize voters. He argues that, instead, it's the idea of the primacy of the individual over the state that should draw people, including gays, to conservatism. Liebman has lived an eventful life. He's been interned in a British camp for Jewish refugees to Palestine; spent his birthday singing Andrews Sisters songs atop a bombed-out Naples orphanage; and taken time off from politics to become a theatrical producer in London. He's also hobnobbed with the celebrated: ``Bill'' Buckley and his wife Pat appear regularly here, while Ronald Reagan confides his fear that dancers are ``funny.'' And around 1950, we learn, Liebman took a young actress named Nancy Davis—the future First Lady—out to Barney's Beanery in Hollywood (``She was rather square and not very interested in politics''). AndrÇ Gide and Sir James Goldsmith make cameo appearances, and, finally, there's Clare Booth Luce, who, Liebman alleges, said she once ``tried it'' with another woman but found it ``rather messy.'' An absorbing, occasionally awkward book given resonance by the author's struggle with—and final acceptance of—his homosexuality. (Sixteen pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8118-0073-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Chronicle Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
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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