A biography of a nationally prominent politician that emphasizes the local. Retired US senator Barry Goldwater has been the subject of several recent biographies, most concentrating on his influence in national conservative politics and military affairs. Iverson (History/Arizona State Univ.) deals with those issues, but he is more concerned with Goldwater's origins as a native Arizonan and the long shadow he casts on local politics even today. Iverson traces Goldwater's several careers, as a department-store operator (the family business being a legacy from Goldwater's grandfather Morris, a Jewish pioneer who came to Arizona in the 1850s), as an airplane pilot, as a soldier, and as a politician, first as a member of the Phoenix city council and then as a national figure. In all these endeavors Goldwater labored to see Arizona develop as an economic power, and he was successful: In tourism and natural-resources extraction and as an outpost of the military-industrial complex, the state leads the Southwest, largely thanks to Goldwater's lobbying. At the same time, Goldwater preached a message of antifederalism and state's rights, decrying such things as ``the aping of socialism and the appeasing of the Communists of Russia'' (this during the conservative Eisenhower administration) and galvanizing the political right in the process. Iverson analyzes with special care local aspects of Goldwater's 1964 run for the presidency, and he attributes Goldwater's resounding loss (he barely carried even Arizona) in part to the ineptitude of his Arizona-drawn campaign team at the national level. Despite the loss, Iverson writes, Goldwater paved the way for the triumph of conservatism that would manifest itself with Ronald Reagan's election 16 years later. Although it's of rather narrow interest, Iverson's book is a highly useful addition to the study of Arizona politics.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-8061-2958-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1997
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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