A fawning volume that focuses on the first 50 years of the celebrated writer, aviator (Lindbergh was the first woman to qualify as a glider pilot), and wife of the Lone Eagle, Charles A. Lindbergh. Hertog, a freelance journalist and photographer, acknowledges early on that she is star-struck, revealing that the woman she calls “Annie” was “my mentor and my friend”—even before they’d met. After a chance encounter with Lindbergh in an airport in 1985, Hertog “pursued” her, eventually interviewing her ten times during the ten years she devoted to the biography. The book, Hertog’s first, begins in 1927. Charles has returned to North America from his solo flight across the Atlantic and is the world’s first mega-celebrity; Anne is a daughter of privilege (her father is Ambassador to Mexico). The two eventually meet, quickly marry, and spend much of their subsequent lives flying all over the world and dodging a predacious press corps. Hertog covers in some detail the two most controversial periods of the Lindberghs’ lives—the 1932 kidnaping and murder of their son and the deep admiration that both Lindberghs felt for Nazi Germany in the pre-WWII years. (Charles was an early and enthusiastic proponent of eugenics.) In prose often precious, Hertog strives mightily to portray Anne as a gifted woman caught in the amber of convention, but another Anne emerges instead—a woman of wealth and leisure, an arrogant, deeply self-centered woman, racist and anti-Semitic (like her husband), whose treacly little books, packed with truisms, enjoyed lengthy stays on best-seller lists. In 1957, poet and critic John Ciardi was the first to declare Empress Anne wore no clothes, but Hertog dismisses him as a “womanizer” who suffered from “spiritual turmoil.— (By contrast, Anne’s sexual infidelity brought her “consolation.—) Although Herzog claims to have lifted Lindbergh’s “mask,— she reveals little, and instead paints on her subject yet another false, flattering face. (84 b&w photos, some not seen) (Book-of-the-Month Club selection; author tour)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-385-46973-X
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
Daniels emerges as a force to be reckoned with—and not someone to cross. Of interest to politics junkies but with plenty of...
A lively, candid memoir from person-in-the-news Daniels.
The author is a household name for just one reason, as she allows—adding, though, that “my life is a lot more interesting than an encounter with Donald Trump.” So it is, and not without considerable effort on her part. Daniels—not her real name, but one, she points out, that she owns, unlike the majority of porn stars—grew up on the wrong side of town, the product of a broken home with few prospects, but she is just as clearly a person of real intelligence and considerable business know-how. Those attributes were not the reason that Trump called her on a fateful night more than a decade ago, but she put them to work, so much so that in some preliminary conversation, he proclaimed—by her account, his talk is blustery and insistent—that “our businesses are kind of a lot alike, but different.” The talk led to what “may have been the least impressive sex I’d ever had, but clearly, he didn’t share that opinion.” The details are deeply unpleasant, but Daniels adds nuance to the record: She doesn’t find it creepy that Trump likened her to his daughter, and she reckons that as a reality show host, he had a few points in his favor even if he failed to deliver on a promise to get her on The Apprentice. The author’s 15 minutes arrived a dozen years later, when she was exposed as the recipient of campaign hush money. Her account of succeeding events is fast-paced and full of sharp asides pointing to the general sleaziness of most of the players and the ugliness of politics, especially the Trumpian kind, which makes the porn industry look squeaky-clean by comparison.
Daniels emerges as a force to be reckoned with—and not someone to cross. Of interest to politics junkies but with plenty of lessons on taking charge of one’s own life.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-250-20556-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 5, 2018
An essential contribution to any discussion of race and likely to be a standard text in cultural studies for years to come.
A compelling, profoundly unsettling blend of memoir and manifesto that proposes that—by design—matters will never improve for African Americans.
To be black, writes Wilderson III, who chairs the African American Studies program at the University of California, Irvine, is not just likely to descend from slaves, but to be forever condemned to the existential condition of a slave. As he writes, “slavery did not end in 1865. It is a relational dynamic…[that] can continue to exist once the settler has left or ceded governmental power.” No other ethnic group—not Native Americans, Asian Americans, Arab Americans, or Hispanic Americans—in the U.S. suffers the same institutional violence, and, Wilderson suggests, all others are more structurally aligned with the white oppressor than with the oppressed African American in a system that hinges on violence. Blending affecting memoir that touches on such matters as mental illness, alienation, exile, and a transcendent maternal love with brittle condemnation of a condition of unfreedom and relentless othering, the author delivers a difficult but necessary argument. It is difficult because it demands that readers of any ethnicity confront hard truths and also because it is densely written, with thickets of postmodern tropes to work through (“blackness is a locus of abjection to be instrumentalized on a whim…a disfigured and disfiguring phobic phenomenon”). The book is deeply pessimistic indeed, as Wilderson rejects any possibility of racial reconciliation in these two-steps-backward times. Perhaps the greatest value of the book is in its posing of questions that may seem rhetorical but in fact probe at interethnic conflicts that are hundreds, even thousands of years old. Wilderson advances a growing body of theory that must be reckoned with and that “has secured a mandate from Black people at their best; which is to say, a mandate to speak the analysis and rage that most Black people are free only to whisper.”
An essential contribution to any discussion of race and likely to be a standard text in cultural studies for years to come.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-63149-614-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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