by Patricia O’Toole ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 24, 2018
A balanced, welcome new addition to the Wilson shelf.
O’Toole (When Trumpets Call: Theodore Roosevelt After the White House, 2005, etc.) adds to a long list of Woodrow Wilson (1856-1924) biographies with a skillfully crafted account of the president’s life and legacy.
As suggested in the title, Wilson considered himself the moral conscience of the United States, and he acted accordingly. After earning a doctorate in political science from Johns Hopkins, he went on to serve as president of Princeton University, a position he approached with an inflexible certainty that he would carry into the White House, a stance that eventually led to impassioned opposition from many fellow Democrats and almost all Republicans. The author narrates the saga chronologically, and her use of anecdotes, foreshadowing, and foils to Wilson results in a lengthy book that is nonetheless a compelling page-turner; the author also has a pleasing prose style. As expected, the majority of the chapters focus on the debate over whether the U.S. should surrender its neutrality to enter World War I, the progress of the war from an American perspective, and the agonizing aftermath as Wilson failed to push through the League of Nations he conceived. Though not exactly groundbreaking news, many readers will still be shocked by the massive coverup of Wilson’s declining health by his wife, Edith, and some of his advisers. O’Toole softens her subject’s hard edges by showing his romantic side with his first wife, who died young, with Edith, and with his three daughters. In addition, the author pays adequate attention to Wilson’s early domestic legislative achievements as well as his tendency toward racism and his overbearing public certainty, which he maintained despite frequent private doubts. Many of O’Toole’s revelations break fresh ground, including the unreliability of Wilson adviser Edward M. House as a source. A bonus derives from the obvious relevance of the Wilson presidency to 21st-century politics. The ways in which Wilson expanded presidential powers bring to mind presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump.
A balanced, welcome new addition to the Wilson shelf.Pub Date: April 24, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9809-4
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2018
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
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 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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