Relentlessly positive in tone, Grande's narrative never dives deeply enough to reward readers’ time.
Ronald Reagan’s former personal assistant reminisces.
Grande was a senior at Pepperdine University when she was offered a position as an intern in Reagan’s office in Century City, California. It was the summer of 1989, and Reagan had only been out of office for a few months. The author ended up working for him for 10 years, quickly rising to become executive assistant to the former president. About halfway through her tenure, Reagan was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and her job evolved to accommodate the former president's declining abilities. By the time she left her post, she was married with three children, and Reagan was no longer able to come into the office at all. From her position, Grande had an unparalleled opportunity to observe Reagan promoting his legacy as a vigorous ex-president and then struggling against a disease that he knew would ultimately force a retirement from public life. She undertook some unusual responsibilities at a relatively early age. Unfortunately, she lacks the objectivity and discernment necessary to produce an insightful view into either Reagan's situation or her own. From the beginning, she was, and remains, utterly star-struck by Reagan; her narrative bubbles over with the reverent enthusiasm of a teenager with a backstage pass to a Justin Bieber concert. Ron and Nancy both appear as paragons of public and private virtue, everyone on their staff always pulled together to achieve logistical miracles, and so forth. The author appears as an appealing character—self-deprecating, gaining in confidence and ability, eager to assist a boss for whom she feels equal parts awe and genuine affection—but her occasional poignant observations about coping with Alzheimer's or maturing in her job are overwhelmed by an onrushing tide of uplifting anecdotes.
Relentlessly positive in tone, Grande's narrative never dives deeply enough to reward readers’ time.Pub Date: Feb. 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-39645-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Hachette
Review Posted Online: Jan. 2, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2016
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
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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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