by Randall Balmer ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 13, 2014
A sympathetic account of a president too often overlooked, embedded in a rethinking of the rise of the religious right.
The words “progressive” and “evangelical” may no longer be thought of together, yet in combination, they shaped Jimmy Carter as a man and president.
So argues academic and Episcopal priest Balmer (Arts and Sciences/Dartmouth Univ.; The Making of Evangelicalism: From Revivalism to Politics and Beyond, 2010, etc.). Carter has never been shy about his beliefs, the author notes, pointing to the way the then-governor of Georgia positioned his campaign for the presidency: “I'm a born-again Christian…and I don't want anything that's not God's will for my life.” Balmer organizes this biography to show that Carter's religious views are the foundation of his politics and continued to set a standard that guided the way he shaped his life after leaving office. Illustrations drawn from the former president's life and numerous writings highlight his discordance with the conservative religious fundamentalism allied to the tea party. As a businessman, for example, Carter refused to join the White Citizens' Council's opposition to school integration; he stood alone, defying boycott of his business and ostracism. However, he was also a fierce competitor who did what he thought necessary to win, as in the Georgia gubernatorial election in 1970. “You won't like my campaign…but you will like my administration,” he told Vernon Jordan. Carter's single-term presidency was characterized, according to Balmer, by the interplay between his ambitious competitiveness and service. Differing from those who attribute Carter's 1980 defeat by Ronald Reagan to foreign policy or economic issues, the author contends that Carter was undermined and out-organized by former supporters of segregation like Jerry Falwell, who birthed what is now known as the religious right by rallying a defense for the tax breaks of private schools.
A sympathetic account of a president too often overlooked, embedded in a rethinking of the rise of the religious right.Pub Date: May 13, 2014
ISBN: 978-0465029587
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: April 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
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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 Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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