A colleague once praised Sorensen’s ability to “use words that everybody can understand—intellectuals, milkmen, diplomats,...
The legendary Kennedy adviser reflects on his own remarkable life.
In 1965 Theodore C. Sorensen authored Kennedy. Now approaching 80, nearly 50 years removed from the job for which he remains best known, John F. Kennedy’s Special Counsel and indispensable wordsmith revisits much of the same territory, this time as “Ted,” a tip-off to this book’s more relaxed tone and focus on his own contributions to JFK’s career. Comparable historically to Colonel House, Harry Hopkins and Karl Rove, the man JFK referred to as “his intellectual blood bank” tells marvelous stories about first going to work for the Massachusetts senator, the writing of JFK’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Profiles in Courage, traveling the country for the 1960 campaign, the first televised presidential debates, the Cuban missile crisis, the triumphal visit to Berlin and, of course, crafting many memorable speeches for candidate and President Kennedy. Although he’s more forthcoming than ever about these and other more delicate topics—including Kennedy’s philandering, the senator’s timid response to the McCarthy censure and the president’s assassination—the author’s deep respect for and heartache at the loss of his mentor clearly abides. Sorensen (Why I Am a Democrat, 1996, etc.) also makes room for stories about his career as an international lawyer, his failed senate bid in 1970, the fiasco surrounding his withdrawn 1977 nomination for Director of Central Intelligence and his continuing role as adviser to the Kennedy family. He expresses regret about the toll his high-powered life took on two failed marriages, and about his own youthful aloofness and arrogance. He also pauses to settle some minor scores with the likes of Kenneth O’Donnell, Richard Goodwin, Joe Biden and Jimmy Carter. Notwithstanding the great events and the famous people that crowd this narrative, the most charming and heartfelt passages concern the author’s early life in Nebraska, as he traces the roots of his family and his still unabashed liberalism.
A colleague once praised Sorensen’s ability to “use words that everybody can understand—intellectuals, milkmen, diplomats, politicians.” The author does just that in this absorbing memoir.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-079871-0
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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
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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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