Too skimpy to interest serious historians, too dull and stiff for general readers looking for a quick overview. (For the...
One of America’s greatest presidents becomes a barely recognizable caricature.
It’s hard to imagine who the audience is supposed to be for this latest installment in the American Presidents series, presided over by Arthur Schlesinger. Of course, Jenkins (Churchill, 2001, etc.), who died earlier this year, had an unenviable task: to take the life of FDR—patrician, world leader, master politician—and condense it into fewer than 200 breezy pages. There’s plenty to choose from. Roosevelt was the scion of one of the country’s truest blue-blood families, and, strangely enough, the author seems most comfortable sketching this genteel Knickerbocker heritage. In describing the almost feudal atmosphere of the Hudson River Valley estates where FDR was raised, Jenkins points out how paradoxical it was that this man, “a product not of the heartland but of the extreme eastern edge and most Europe-centered part of America,” would be so successful at “transcending geography and uniting the continent.” Although permanently linked in the public mind, FDR and intellectual roustabout Teddy Roosevelt, whom FDR greatly admired and tried to emulate, were only distant cousins. Jenkins describes the halting and imperfect road that FDR took toward the White House, marked by such relatively low points as his undistinguished term as assistant secretary of the Navy and an unsuccessful vice-presidential candidacy in 1920. But even after FDR’s election as New York governor and finally his ascendancy to the White House in 1932 (an office he would hold until his death in 1945) this life fails to take flight. Only in limning the chinks in the normally revered FDR’s armor—especially in his less-than-romantic relationship with wife Eleanor—does Jenkins manage to render any of it terribly interesting.
Too skimpy to interest serious historians, too dull and stiff for general readers looking for a quick overview. (For the other descriptive extreme, see Conrad Black, above.)Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2003
ISBN: 0-8050-6959-3
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
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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