by Robin Harris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 24, 2013
Partisan but evenhanded—a useful account alongside more critical, more complete studies of Thatcher and the lasting effects...
Admiring but not uncritical biography of England’s Iron Lady, written by Tory stalwart and sometime Thatcher speechwriter Harris.
Following her death in April, Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) is coming in for reassessment, with at least three major biographies out this season and doubtless more to come. That she was not universally admired when she was in office is an understatement; that her own party turned her out of office in 1990 says as much, though of course Britons have turned out greater politicians, from Charles I to Winston Churchill. Harris allows that there is reason for the ambivalence, for Thatcher was not committed to any ideal of social equality along the hated French and American models: “It was not her aim to create a more equal society, only one where there was more opportunity.” Inequality, she believed, went hand in hand with liberty, and though, by Harris’ account, she never bought into the voodoo of trickle-down economics, she also essentially blamed the poor for their own poverty. As is well-known, and as Harris reiterates, Thatcher came from the fringes of the middle class and was a classic by-the-bootstraps case. She was also hypersensitive, vengeful and possessed of a long memory—never a good combination. One key adviser, Harris notes, was fired because “he did not flatter her enough and he made the mistake of ganging up on her with others—albeit for what he thought was her own good.” For all that, the author points to Thatcher’s accomplishments, along the Reagan lines, in making Britons feel proud to be Britons again, absence of empire and all, and in asserting Britain’s role as an equal partner among the Allied powers in the waning days of the Cold War, even if America was not always appreciative of her insistence.
Partisan but evenhanded—a useful account alongside more critical, more complete studies of Thatcher and the lasting effects of her years in power (see Charles Moore's recent authorized biography).Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-04715-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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by Robin Harris & illustrated by Robin Harris
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 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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