Lightweight bio of Rush Hudson Limbaugh III, the heartland eminence whose glib wit and rough charms have made him a heavyweight champion of tory causes. With no help (or hindrance) from his subject, Colford (a media columnist for Newsday) has cobbled together a once-over-lightly account of Limbaugh's life that, among other shortcomings, provides superfluous detail on broadcast-industry minutiae. The author first tracks the man from Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in his determined efforts to forge a career in radio. Having failed as a top-40 DJ and spent five unfulfilling years in promotion for baseball's Kansas City Royals, Limbaugh made a name for himself as host of an afternoon talk show in Sacramento—an act taken national in 1988 by a crafty packager. The rest, so to speak, is history: The immensely popular college dropout (who turns 42 this year) now reaches over four million listeners daily with his brashly conservative radio commentaries. He also presides over a half-hour syndicated TV show and, of course, has written the bestselling The Way Things Ought to Be (1992). While Colford expresses some grudging admiration for Limbaugh—whose jocular broadsides challenge conventional liberal wisdom on fronts from abortion to cultural diversity, the environment, feminists, homosexuality, and taxation—he's at pains to dish such dirt as can be unearthed. Among other matters, the author delves inconclusively into Limbaugh's 4-F draft status during the Vietnam War; remarks frequently on his subject's lifelong weight problems; features sources who view the twice- divorced commentator as a lonely guy; and questions whether a Manhattan-based Limbaugh can survive as a superstar member of the media elite he professes to despise. What Colford doesn't do is offer any sustained analysis of the visceral appeal of an entertainer who's given voice to many of the electorate's deepest aspirations—and fears. A profile of a consequential showman, then, that's more notable for background noise than substantive content. (Eight pages of photographs—not seen).
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-312-09906-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
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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