by Robert Dallek & Terry Golway ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 17, 2006
Useful for students of presidential history, and worthy of emulation: a selected Ford, anyone?
Excerpts of selected speeches, interviews and debates delivered by the last president (but one) not to speak from note cards or in sound bites; packaged with an audio CD.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, avow presidential historian Dallek (Flawed Giant, 1998) and New York Observer columnist Golway (Washington’s General, 2005), “spoke in literate paragraphs, and his speeches were filled with references to history and literature that have all but disappeared from American political discourse.” Indeed, Ronald Reagan borrowed the “city on a hill” trope, unacknowledged, from Kennedy, who took it from the early American Protestant religious dissenter John Winthrop; it always sounded a little foreign on Reagan’s lips, but Kennedy—though, famously, the first and only Catholic president—naturally took to the rhetoric of Boston’s Brahmins. Dallek and Golway, for their part, acknowledge that Kennedy had speechwriters aplenty, notably the brilliant Theodore Sorensen, who wrote much of Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage; regrettably, they do not go on to distinguish which of his aides concocted which New Frontier theme. The help notwithstanding, Kennedy did his homework, was smart and hardworking and gave a resounding speech. As Dallek and Golway remark on the best of his public utterances, they offer illuminations and remember little-known episodes. The third presidential debate with Richard Nixon featured Nixon tsk-tsking Harry Truman for using words like “hell” and “damn,” saying that he’d never allow such language in his White House. (The irony, the irony.) The debates were followed by the narrowest election in history, they note, but not so narrow as Nixon protested; even if Nixon had won the supposedly rigged Illinois vote, Kennedy would have carried the Electoral College. And Kennedy berated himself over the Bay of Pigs disaster, which only seemed to increase the esteem his compatriots felt: “It’s like Eisenhower,” he said. “The worse I do, the more popular I get.”
Useful for students of presidential history, and worthy of emulation: a selected Ford, anyone?Pub Date: April 17, 2006
ISBN: 1-4022-0647-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2006
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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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