Sturdy political biography of the author of modern American conservatism (not authorized, but written with its subject's cooperation) . Historian Goldberg (Univ. of Utah) is well grounded in the big picturethe evolution of conservative thought and the inner workings of electoral politics. This helps him to place Goldwater in the tradition of the libertarian right and also to document the social and political forces that brought him, if only for a brief time, to the forefront of the Republican Party after the collapse of Nelson Rockefeller's moderate agenda in the early 1960s. Goldberg's analysis of national trends of the timeand especially of the role of the mediawill be of special interest to students of contemporary politics. Goldberg also has an appreciation for the smaller details, such as Goldwater's fascination with aircraft, radios, photography, and the outdoors, the things that make the icon of conservatism human. (So, too, does Goldwater's wry, self-deprecating humor, such as his saying to journalist Stewart Alsop in the thick of the 1964 presidential campaign, ``You know, I haven't got a really first-class brain.'') Himself a resident of the West, Goldberg understands the ``frontier values'' that affected Goldwater's conception of politics, such as his belief that a government ought to operate like his mother's household, ``open, direct, and honest.'' Goldberg points out a few ironiesfor one, the civil libertarian Goldwater's championing of Joseph McCarthy, saying, ``the people who want to get rid of [him] . . . are people who coddle communists''and notes that Arizonans, a conservative bunch and Goldwater's earliest constituency, have long benefited from federal largess for which the antiBig Government Goldwater was largely responsible. All in all, a useful addition to the growing library of books (see Lee Edwards's Goldwater, p. 751) on Goldwater's role in postwar American politics.
Pub Date: Oct. 18, 1995
ISBN: 0-300-06261-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
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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