After reading this, voters may find no compelling reason to support Jeb, either.
Bush 2008? Anyone who worries at the prospect will want to have a look at this partial—and revealing—portrait.
The Bushes harbor dynastic ambitions, but the old patrician noblesse oblige has changed. “Somehow,” writes Palm Beach Post Tallahassee bureau chief and longtime John Ellis Bush watcher Dáte, “Prescott Bush’s duty to lead has, through a new combination of chromosomes, mutated into the right to rule.” By Dáte’s account, that conviction impelled George W., older and less gifted, to seek the White House. It may set Jeb Bush—unlike his brother, a reader, policy-minded leader and hard worker—on the same course, unless Dubya so tarnishes the name that no Bush is named dogcatcher, much less chief executive. The brothers do not always get along, especially on Election Day 2000, when it appeared that Jeb, governor of Florida, would not be able to deliver his state. Dáte suggests that a clear-cut Dubya victory might have been in the bag had not Jeb alienated some 300,000 black voters with an attack on affirmative action; but then, as he notes, Jeb, though not racist as such, has some difficulties with minorities, mostly the poor ones, who, in his worldview, bring poverty on themselves. In this, Dáte writes, Jeb is much like his brother. He shares other points on the résumé, having been allowed to use other people’s money—especially the taxpayers’ in the wake of the infamous S&L scandal—to make their fortunes. He is also like his brother in having come to office on a pleasing “compassionate conservatism” platform that instantly hardened into a rightist, “win-at-any-cost” antagonism, much beholden to fundamentalist Christians and the hardcore right. Jeb has also frittered away Floridians’ money by giving massive tax cuts to the rich—Dáte writes that his Democratic predecessors raised taxes and created more jobs than Bush has, disproving his fiscal arguments—and, though priding himself on being an “education governor” of the no-child-left-behind ilk, has much worsened Florida’s schools. There is scarcely a positive note in the book, save that Dáte finds Jeb personally likeable in some measure and notes that Jeb at least registered for the draft during the Vietnam era, even if, as Bush said, he “wanted to get married, work and have a family” and had “no compelling reason to go to Vietnam.”
After reading this, voters may find no compelling reason to support Jeb, either.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2007
ISBN: 1-58542-548-6
Page Count: 416
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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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