Adroitly told biography of Russell Long, longtime US senator from Louisiana, by his former press secretary. Long's legendary father, Huey (``Kingfish'') Long, was assassinated when the future senator was 16. As a young man, Russell showed the family flair for politics (his uncle Earl also was governor of Louisiana) and was elected at age 30 to the Senate- -an incoming class that included Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey, and Estes Kefauver. Mann tells how senators initially suspicious of Long because of his father's skin-'em-and-feed-'em-to-the- alligators style of doing business were won over by this polite young man who cultivated friendships and coalitions. Long's early Senate years were marked by Quixote-like stands against massive foreign-aid proposals by Truman and Eisenhower: He believed the government should spend for domestic needs. Prescient in many ways (and frustrated by Eisenhower's tightfisted treatment of the poor), he said in 1955, ``Republicans believe that prosperity and most good things trickle down from the top.'' By 1965, Long had become chairman of the Finance Committee and also majority whip—the most powerful man in the Senate. Among his proposals were the check-off box for federally financed campaigns, the Employee Stock Ownership Plan, the Earned Income Tax credit, SSI, large increases in Medicaid, and two ideas (from 1972) being touted in the present presidential campaign: ``workfare'' and forcing runaway fathers to pay child support. One reason for Long's effectiveness, Mann says, was his plain-spoken manner. In a battle with Jimmy Carter, who wanted to cut deductions for the ``three-martini'' business lunch, Long told reporters that ``entertainment is to the selling business as fertilizer is to the farmer—it increases yield.'' An absorbing account of one of America's great Çminences grises. (Photos—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1992
ISBN: 1-55778-467-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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