Not quite: half-untold, half-old is more like it, along with a ton of reprints and a pound of self-promotion, in this so-so look at investigative biography. According to Weinberg (Journalism/Univ. of Missouri; Armand Hammer, 1989), the biographical arts changed forever in 1975, when Robert Caro published his Pulitzer-winning The Power Broker. Until then, biography had belonged to scholars writing objective lives of dead subjects; suddenly, it fell into the hands of journalists muckraking about the living. After a brief history of the genre (earlier groundbreakers: Boswell and Strachey), Weinberg digs into The Power Broker, as well as the first volumes of Caro's LBJ bio, to show how a ruthless search for sources (e.g., tracking down every living grammar-school classmate of Johnson's) and a high-wire writing style revolutionized the field. In similar fashion, Weinberg pores over the work of Donald Barlett and James Steele (``the best team in the history of investigative reporting''), showing how their brilliant Philadelphia Inquirer exposÇs of the IRS, the FHA, and so on came through obsessive detective work. Perhaps to add the personal touch, Weinberg also describes his own methods in writing his biography of Armand Hammer. A look at magazine profiles follows, along with a litany of the obstacles, mostly legal, put in biographers' paths. Weinberg offers 11 guidelines to good biography; he also includes loads of reprints, including: ``A Note on Sources'' from each of the Caro works; a minibiography by Barlett and Steele from a nuclear-waste exposÇ; a New Yorker Calvin Trillin profile of a police reporter; a scathing Washington Post Magazine exposÇ of Kitty Kelley; and, without a blush, a Los Angeles Times piece that heaps praise on his own Hammer biography. Useful for biographer-wannabes. Otherwise, read Kelley for kicks, Caro for crack reporting, Boswell for brilliance.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8262-0873-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
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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