Loads of down-and-dirty political fun.
Hillary Rodham Clinton's advance man recounts his adventures as the head staffer responsible for assuring glitch-free traveling appearances for the First Lady.
A political animal since his teenage years, Halley is invited to advance for Hillary before the 1992 presidential election. Initially reluctant to work for a “secondary” (this old hand advances only for principals), the author is lured away from his desk job to plan her swing through New England and finds himself hooked for the next decade. Equal parts event-manager, crowd-builder, public-relations man, and problem-solver, Halley looks for the best photo ops in Argentina, chases yaks in Mongolia, and makes sure that Hillary is never seen in the same place as Fidel Castro when the two of them are booked into the same Swiss hotel. With a story for every location, and an inside look at how the administration responds to major events ranging from the Oklahoma City bombing to the Lewinsky scandal, Halley tells all in a salty, engaging tone of a Boston boy who is still thrilled to have hit the political big time. Working in close proximity to the first family only increases the author's respect for them, though he is most loyal to Hillary; the author displays tempered admiration for the president, but nonetheless engages him in a shoving match when Bill wants to take the stage at a Hillary event before Halley's lighting cues have started. Halley does not exempt himself from the ribbing, gamely relating the time he wound up nude in a Japanese hotel lobby. His real bile, however, is reserved for right-wing crusaders and the mud-slinging they aimed at the Clintons throughout the president's two terms.
Loads of down-and-dirty political fun.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03111-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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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