A revealing window into the fascinating aquarium of the “Obama people” and all their “hope and hard-won change.”
The inside scoop on how a recent college graduate went from working in a warehouse to becoming a senior writer for the Barack Obama White House.
Following memoirs by his colleagues Alyssa Mastromonoco (Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?, 2018) and David Litt (Thanks, Obama, 2017) and ahead of Dan Pfeiffer’s resistance primer Yes We (Still) Can, former senior White House writer Cunnane, now a writer for the TV show Designated Survivor, offers his fitfully funny, often earnest insider’s look at the Obama era. Beginning as a media monitor, the author stumbled through learning the ropes (“what’s a POTUS?”), his first security briefing (Secret Service agent: “congratulations, you’re sitting in the cherry on top of every terrorist’s dream cake”), and his first significant lesson (“fortunately, sometimes at the White House, you fail up”). It’s clear that the author has a little chip on his shoulder, earned from the affectionate teasing he endured, but overall, he offers a warm and observant portrait of what it’s like to work for the White House. Among other stories: his engagement in the Rose Garden and Obama’s sneaking out to Starbucks, where he tasked Cunnane with handling the press: “Let’s test your wrangling skills.” We learn that after Obama made his case at the 2013 G-20 summit, Vladimir Putin told him, “you’ve got some big balls.” In his discussion of “disaster travel” following mass shootings, Cunnane shows us what a real president is made of. “He was more than our consoler in chief,” he writes. “Obama pushed the conversation forward. He reminded us that though our politics are often small, these moments can lay bare the best in us, displaying our better angels and our big hearts.” When he’s truly candid, Cunnane nails it. “All in all, I wrote hundreds of pages in his voice,” he writes. “It was the honor of my life.”
A revealing window into the fascinating aquarium of the “Obama people” and all their “hope and hard-won change.”Pub Date: April 17, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-7829-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 28, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2018
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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