Decter is correct in saying that people are complex; she herself is a good example. At the same time, she’s not hard to...
Former Harper’s editor Decter (The New Chastity, 1972, etc.) offers a memoir that displays her ability to cut through the blather of received opinion and her talent for cranky, narrow-minded attitudinizing.
Though she waves the flag of neoconservatism, Decter can be a peddler of the kind of horse sense that feels like a cooling breeze on a hot afternoon. The most valuable of such have to do with feminist dead-ends, like the idea of all men being the enemy—a notion toxic to the project of overthrowing sexism—or Betty Friedan’s woefully inaccurate take on the joy of being a male breadwinner. Decter has always believed that molds are for jello, not humans: Organizational Man? Second Sex? People aren’t so neatly compartmentalized. Decter plumps for personal responsibility, good manners, respectful language—who says no?—but then she skates onto thin ice with remarks about everybody having “made his or her own bed to lie in,” a sentiment denying factors such as class, race, religion, and the extremes of poverty. By the time she’s heading up the Committee for the Free World and associating with the Heritage Foundation, Decter (it seems) finds her neocon credentials more important than any native intelligence. She refers to George McGovern as coming from the “hard left” and alludes to our “national anxiety attack” over Vietnam as if the nobility of that war were a foregone, undebatable conclusion. Her memory becomes selective: She recalls images of South Vietnamese pleading to be evacuated with US embassy personnel but forgets those of children screaming in the aftermath of a US napalm attack. And who knows what to make of remarks such as “lesbianism being something it is possible to outgrow” or gay men actively courting AIDS “because society is putting up so little resistance to their demands”?
Decter is correct in saying that people are complex; she herself is a good example. At the same time, she’s not hard to pigeonhole: file her under right wing.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-039428-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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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