A smoothly written, comprehensive life of a man at once complex and superficial—truly an icon of the modern age.
Hailed in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, Henry Ford was “an American icon”—and, argues historian Watts, the principal architect of American consumer culture.
Born on a Michigan farm in 1863, Ford did not want for much; the crops were good, and his mother imparted to him a Victorian ethic that “forged a creed combining Protestant moralism, market individualism, the work ethic, and genteel restraint.” The McGuffey Readers did their part, too, as did Thomas Edison, whom Ford met after having developed a prototype car in 1896. Edison approved of his design, exclaiming, “Your car is self-contained—it carries its own power-plant—no fire, no boiler, no smoke, no steam. You have the thing. Keep at it.” Ford took from Edison a certainty that technology could yield social good and wealth by improving the lot of the workers, as well as reinforcement for his own views on the virtues of hard work and frugality. He eventually turned social engineer, using some of his immense wealth to fund anti-tobacco and anti-alcohol crusades, all in the name of good business and efficiency; he once remarked that he would never hire a manager who looked to be worn or in bad shape, reckoning that such a fellow would use Ford’s money as poorly as he did his own body. About the time Ford’s business practices—don’t allow unions, but pay well, and the like—were being lauded in totalitarian Germany and Leninist Russia as the face of the industrial future, Ford expanded his extracurricular interests to include railing against Jews; as with his adoption of fad diets and spiritualist causes, Watts observes, Ford “offered a mishmash of half-digested concepts and visceral intuitions, rather than systematic analysis, so his social and cultural speculations did not probe very deeply.” Deeply enough, though, to lose market share and political influence—and to have his name forever associated with despicable causes as much as remembered for his very real achievements.
A smoothly written, comprehensive life of a man at once complex and superficial—truly an icon of the modern age.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-40735-9
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2005
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
