A well-written book for lovers of book publishing and supporters of human rights.
Former Random House President Bernstein gives a fascinating history of publishing in the 20th century and traces the beginnings of the human rights movement.
The author’s stories of beginning at Simon & Schuster after World War II as office boy “in waiting,” working his way up into the sales department, and working on the Little Golden Books all vividly illustrate corporate life in the publishing industry. During that time, he was fortunate to meet Kay Thompson, who was looking for someone to promote a new line of Eloise merchandise to accompany her bestselling books. It did so well that, after being fired from Simon & Schuster, Bernstein continued promoting Eloise. In a perfect example of the importance of networking and knowing people, the owner of Books, Inc. in San Francisco mentioned Bernstein to Bennett Cerf, owner of Random House, who hired him in 1956. Thompson went with him, and he became her literary agent. As he notes, children’s books fueled his career. He began with a book of stories linked to Shirley Temple’s TV show and worked for years with Dr. Seuss. Within a decade, he was president of the company. He continued Cerf’s publishing philosophy to print books because they were important, even if they weren’t big sellers, and Cerf’s legacy taught Bernstein to hire and delegate and to “beware of articulate incompetents.” Without his high-profile position at Random House, he might not have been invited to Moscow in 1970, where he was exposed to the Soviet dissident movement, then in its infancy. From then on, the author was active in many organizations related to human rights, including the Association of American Publishers, the Fund for Free Expression, the International Freedom to Publish Commission, and as chair of Human Rights Watch. The Helsinki Final Act of 1975 helped hatch the Helsinki Watch and America’s Watch, eventually covering the Middle East, China, and Africa; Bernstein was there for it all.
A well-written book for lovers of book publishing and supporters of human rights.Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62097-171-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
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
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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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