An intriguing if predictable autobiography by one of the most powerful politicians to have emerged in the past decade, now host of a CBS-TV morning show. Moving from a directionless college grad to being the youngest person ever elected to the New York City Council to a position of leadership in the US Congress, Molinari has been, as she notes, very much “a young woman in a hurry.” Yet she exhibits—and makes a point of the fact here—an ordinariness that both makes her appealing and disguises her intelligence and determination. Born and raised in Staten Island, the daughter of Gus Molinari, whose congressional seat she eventually took over, she became an effective advocate for both the needs and values of that borough. Most entertaining here are her stories of the battles she waged, as the only Republican on the New York City Council, on behalf of her constituents. How she did so, the political strategies and compromises along the way, are the types of detail that make of this book more than simply self-promoting fluff. As a congressional representative, she continued her independent ways. A feminist and pro-choice, she became a “player” in a Republican Party increasingly hostile to both positions. Ideologically unpredictable, she played the political game as well as anyone, never losing the down-to-earth image that made her enormously appealing. Her detailed analysis of the enigma that is Newt Gingrich offers some true insights into the man. We do not, however, get much more than a surface impression of Molinari herself, the contradictions of her political beliefs, the source of her obvious driving ambition. She plays too much on her image of normalcy when she is in many ways anything but normal. The writing talents of Elinor Burkett (The Right Women, p. 90, etc.) no doubt add much to this above-average autobiography. Self-serving in many ways, the book still has much to offer as an examination of how US politics really works. (16 b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: May 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-49220-0
Page Count: 356
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1998
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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