The ``great man'' approach, ferociously but ploddingly revived. In the second volume of his history of the US presidency, Riccards (President/Sheperd College; A Republic If You Can Keep It, not reviewed) takes the story from Theodore Roosevelt to George Bush. He analyzes chief executives through the lens of five presidential models: Federalist (nonpartisan magistrates asserting power in foreign policy); Jeffersonian (working through consensus with legislative leaders); Jacksonian (using strong ties to the citizenry to exercise control over the government's agenda); Whig (deference to legislature); and Lincolnian (strong control over domestic and external affairs as a result of necessity). Nevertheless, based on secondary sources, Riccards's analysis offers no new insights or information. The first Roosevelt was scoffed at as ``that damn cowboy'' when he assumed office, but he asserted presidential power at home and abroad, busting trusts and building the Panama Canal. The conservative Howard Taft was Teddy's handpicked successor, though TR would eventually proclaim him a ``fathead.'' Woodrow Wilson skillfully maneuvered America into a world war and international leadership, completing a process begun during the Spanish-American War. A series of Republican nonentities followed him, leading to the towering figure of the 20th-century presidency, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The author gives Dwight D. Eisenhower credit for opposing Joseph McCarthy and keeping the US out of war in Indochina. He sees JFK as a dark figure and LBJ as the last president with a truly creative domestic agenda. A dull reading of grand history. (First printing of 50,000)
Pub Date: May 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-56833-042-1
Page Count: 424
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1995
Categories: GENERAL HISTORY | UNITED STATES | HISTORY
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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
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HOLOCAUST | HISTORY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL HISTORY
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This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
Categories: BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES | ETHNICITY & RACE
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