No graphic descriptions of sexual play, but the cumulative power of these ardent letters makes it hard to believe that...
At last, a firsthand look at the emotionally charged correspondence between Eleanor Roosevelt and “first friend” Lorena Hickok, believed by many to be the First Lady’s lover.
Streitmatter (Journalism/American Univ.; Mightier Than the Sword, 1997) has collected and annotated more than 300 of the perhaps more than 3,500 letters exchanged by Roosevelt and Hickok between 1933 and 1962, when ER, as she signed herself, died. The letters document that the relationship was not only “intense and intimate, but also passionate and physical,” notes the editor. Hickok destroyed many letters, explaining that the First Lady “wasn’t always so very discreet in her letters to me.” Hickok (a.k.a. Hick) was a talented and successful reporter for the Associated Press, assigned to cover Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 campaign for president. As she also began writing stories about Eleanor, the two grew close. When the First Lady moved into the White House, she began writing Hickok daily, and sometimes twice a day, often beginning “Hick darling” and concluding with words of longing: “I would give a good deal to put my arms around you and to feel yours around me.” Hick’s responses were less effusive, but still affectionate. She also advised the First Lady on how to put her stamp on the White House role, suggesting press conferences and the “My Day” column, and urging her to make the famous coal mine visit. As public and family demands on Eleanor accelerated, her relationship with Hick became more distant. But she remained loyal in Hick’s difficult later years, offering her financial and emotional support.
No graphic descriptions of sexual play, but the cumulative power of these ardent letters makes it hard to believe that Eleanor and Hick’s relationship was “entirely asexual,” as one of the Roosevelt granddaughters insists.Pub Date: Oct. 9, 1998
ISBN: 0-684-84928-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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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