A fresh perspective on a president whose style, legacy, and politics continue to inspire discussions about freedom and...
A focused cultural analysis of John F. Kennedy’s “manly ethos.”
Watts (History/Univ. of Missouri; Self-Help Messiah: Dale Carnegie and Success in Modern America, 2013, etc.) probes the masculine allure JFK represented and how it changed a nation’s impression of what a man and a political leader should embody. The author shows how, amid the “high-flying spirit of the New Frontier,” this idolized, charismatic leader navigated his personal and political lives. In the late 1950s and early ’60s, male society experienced what was considered a postwar “crisis of masculinity” due to modern workplace bureaucracies and “increasingly angry feminists,” both of which inspired a backlash in which a “cultural crusade for masculine regeneration” began to swell. Effervescently young, handsome, and idealistic, JFK came to symbolize this movement. Perhaps the book’s most compelling viewpoints are formed from the astute attention paid to the interconnectedness of the “Kennedy Circle.” This stylish, influential collective consisted not of political advisers but rather prominent male celebrities who, in one form or another, through behavior or appearance, exuded and thus promoted the touchstones of an undeniably masculine aesthetic: physical attractiveness, youth, vigor, bravado, and unbridled, unrepentant virility. Particularly provocative are chapters featuring Norman Mailer, Frank Sinatra, Hugh Hefner, Kirk Douglas, and Tony Curtis. The author also examines the consequential fallout from the president’s 1963 assassination, as the country mourned the demise of their iconic leader and the modern embodiment of political leadership thus changed. A tad overanalyzed but consistently bolstered by solid research and convincing arguments, the book conjoins its subject’s two most memorable images—the private “tireless sexual adventurer” and the responsible, citizen-centered politician—and reconciles them both into a dignitary who, for better or worse, created indelible change for America.
A fresh perspective on a president whose style, legacy, and politics continue to inspire discussions about freedom and leadership values.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-04998-8
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
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
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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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