by Susan Lewis Solomont ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 26, 2019
Useful reading for those in a similar position, whether in the public or private sector, and a strong case for better...
Entrepreneur and philanthropist Solomont writes of her tour of duty as the wife of the U.S. ambassador to Spain and Andorra—an unpaid position, she pointedly notes, but a full-time one.
When Barack Obama appointed Alan Solomont to represent the U.S. before the governments of Spain and Andorra in 2009, the author stepped into a “diminutive role of ‘ambassador’s spouse.’ ” At the ambassadorial equivalent of boot camp, each student was given a thick binder full of information about all the ambassadors in training, but it included nothing about their spouses. What was immediately clear was that those spouses were not allowed to work while in service, leaving unwelcome gaps in their employment history and Social Security contributions, all because of the potential for conflict of interest. “Acquiescence is not in my DNA,” writes the author. “If there wasn’t a meaningful role for me to fill—something that would allow me to put my own skills and intelligence to work—then I would create one.” The role she created included helping Spanish olive growers develop branding strategies, mentoring women in business, and, in the end, becoming “somewhat of a mini maven when it comes to Spain, learning everything I could about the country.” Meanwhile, she recounts, her husband helped forge a stronger relationship between the U.S. and the Spanish government, especially by developing a friendship with King Juan Carlos, whom the ambassador gave credit for the “leadership and vision” that allowed the nation to emerge from under the shadow of the long Franco dictatorship. Although her protestations against State Department policies regarding spouses come too frequently and repetitively, it is clear that Solomont made the most of the opportunities presented by “the mixed blessing of a relatively blank slate.”
Useful reading for those in a similar position, whether in the public or private sector, and a strong case for better defining the roles of diplomatic spouses, to say nothing of paying them for their work.Pub Date: March 26, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63331-030-8
Page Count: 276
Publisher: Disruption Books
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2019
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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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...
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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