American citizens weren't so complacent during the 1970s and '80s.
So argues Foley (American History/Univ. of Sheffield; Confronting the War Machine: Draft Resistance During the Vietnam War, 2003), who seeks to correct conventional wisdom about the upheaval of the '60s being followed by exhaustion that led in turn to a surrender to cynical partisan politics. The author explains how he became attuned to "front porch politics," in which neighbors put aside partisanship to address obvious problems at home, during his childhood, when he observed the local democracy of New Hampshire town meetings, sometimes led by his father. Foley believes such activism helped numerous rural and urban areas solve problems, sometimes with help from elected officials, sometimes in spite of those officials. Going more broad than deep, the author examines communities' responses to environmental degradation (toxic waste in the air, land and water); nuclear energy plant sitings; racial discrimination; loss of factory jobs and unemployment generally; homelessness; the AIDS epidemic; gender discrimination; and the controversy over abortion rights. Although Foley disputes the traditional narrative about apathy during the '70s and '80s, he agrees that front porch politics has declined since the '90s, replaced mostly by unfocused rage within the citizenry and a somewhat more focused distrust of government at all levels. Grass-roots organizing to address local problems must return across the nation, he suggests, or the American experience will continue to decline for all but the wealthiest citizens.
An interesting take on American political life during the past 50 years, persuasively backed by anecdotal evidence and macro-level research.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8090-5482-4
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2013
Categories: UNITED STATES | HISTORY | CURRENT EVENTS & SOCIAL ISSUES
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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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