A cautionary analysis for future leaders.
A study of how Barack Obama’s handling of the 2008 economic crisis undermined his presidency.
As a member of the transition team for the Clinton and Obama presidencies and former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Hundt (In China’s Shadow: The Crisis of American Entrepreneurship, 2006, etc.) was a knowledgeable observer of and participant in Obama’s economic decisions in the months before his inauguration. With no lack of histories, memoirs, and anatomies of the Great Recession, Hundt’s hard-hitting critique is distinguished by the voices of many key players—e.g., Lawrence Summers, Al Gore, Henry Paulson, Robert Reich, Peter Orszag, and David Axelrod—drawn from dozens of interviews. The author’s brisk, tense, and discomfiting history supports his contention that Obama’s policies inevitably culminated in the election of Donald Trump by an angry, disaffected populace. Hundt was an early supporter of Obama and remains a staunch admirer. Obama, he writes, “always stood for inclusion, tolerance, and unity. He worked hard, acted with integrity, stood for high-minded principles.” He was ill-served, however, by the neoliberals and Clinton advisers he chose for his transition team and powerful posts in his administration. They diverted his attention from the dramatic changes in health care, infrastructure, innovations in clean energy, and education reform that he promised during his campaign and convinced him to prop up Wall Street. They advocated bank bailouts to prevent bank runs, budget-balancing, and trust in markets to stanch a worsening economic crisis. Comparing Obama’s economic decisions with Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Hundt points to “premature announcements, mistaken assumptions, misplaced fear of deficits, untoward concern for big banks, self-serving assessments, and constraints imposed by non-stimulus considerations” among reasons he deems Obama’s leadership problematic. Hundt’s proposal for infrastructure overhaul involving clean energy generation and new transmission networks was summarily rejected by Summers, Geithner, and Orszag. Obama, however, “could have achieved a robust recovery” by spurring private-sector investment in such proposals. Instead of instituting bold changes, he allowed the rich to get richer, while the economically oppressed voted for Trump.
A cautionary analysis for future leaders.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948122-31-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Review Posted Online: Nov. 20, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2018
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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