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FEINGOLD

Name: FEINGOLD
Author: Sandy Horwitt
ISBN: 978-1-4165-3492-1

A NEW DEMOCRATIC PARTY

by Sandy Horwitt ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 24, 2007

Not an official biography, but it might as well be.

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Admiring portrait of the maverick liberal who was the only U.S. Senator to oppose the Patriot Act and the first to call for a timetable for American troop withdrawal from Iraq.

Horwitt, the biographer of activist Saul Alinsky (Let Them Call Me Rebel, 1989), draws extensively on interviews with friends, family and colleagues of the 54-year-old, twice-divorced Wisconsin Democrat. Russ Feingold grew up in one of the few Jewish families in Janesville, a small farming community. His Yiddish-speaking Russian grandfather Max owned a grocery store; his father was a progressive lawyer. One of five children, Feingold early showed himself to be bright, hardworking and a self-described “renegade by nature,” waging campaigns at his high school for a more relaxed dress code and other reforms. He first tasted politics at the University of Wisconsin, where he campaigned for John Lindsay in the 1972 Presidential primary. After college and a stint as a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, he attended Harvard Law, practiced briefly and won election to the Wisconsin state senate in 1982. Ten years later, at 39, he became the youngest member of the U.S. Senate. He co-sponsored the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform bill, passed in 2002, led efforts to censure George Bush over NSA wiretapping of international phone calls and remains a steadfast opponent of the Iraq war. Written with the senator’s cooperation, the book describes an unfailingly courageous politician who champions reform in the progressive tradition of Teddy Roosevelt and Wisconsin Governor Robert M. La Follette, often to the consternation of colleagues. “You’re not living in the real world,” Hillary Clinton told him when he objected to the Democratic Party’s efforts to gut McCain-Feingold. Noting that the Wisconsin senator has been discussed as a possible presidential contender, the author suggests that Feingold offers “a serious, authentic alternative” to Washington’s Democratic establishment.

Not an official biography, but it might as well be.

Pub Date: July 24, 2007

ISBN: 978-1-4165-3492-1

Page Count: 336

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2007

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | POLITICAL & ROYALTY | GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

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BLACK BOY

A RECORD OF CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

by Richard Wright ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 28, 1945

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This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.

It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.

Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.

Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945

ISBN: 0061130249

Page Count: 450

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND
by Richard Wright

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SEEING INTO TOMORROW
by Richard Wright ; illustrated by Nina Crews

- BOOK REVIEW
A FATHER’S LAW
by Richard Wright

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NIGHT

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...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.