Intriguing, but the author lacks the tact needed to sway the masses.
Conservative economist DiLorenzo (How Capitalism Saved America, 2004) continues his diatribe about the causes of the Civil War that he began in The Real Lincoln (not reviewed).
Indeed, the author repeats many of the arguments made in his previous book, published in 2002. His contention that Abraham Lincoln was a white supremacist whose primary motivation for fighting the Civil War was a desire to maintain a system of tariffs that greatly benefited northern states has enough evidence behind it to at least be compelling. But his unrelenting vitriol toward an American icon, perhaps the foremost American icon, will undoubtedly rankle many and may position him as a publicity-hungry academic peddling controversy. DiLorenzo (Economics/Loyola Coll.) contends that a “Lincoln cult” seeks to perpetuate his image as a near-perfect president for the purpose of promoting big government, weakening states’ rights and justifying the controversial actions of later chief executives. As an example, the author points to neo-conservative Michelle Malkin’s In Defense of Internment (2004), which tried to rationalize FDR’s treatment of Japanese-Americans during WWII, an act that mirrored Lincoln’s imprisonment of northerners who protested his use of force to keep the South in the Union. Historians from the left and the right are members of the Lincoln cult, DiLorenzo states, seeking to use some facet of his legacy to bolster their own agendas. The author’s arguments that the South had a legal right to secede and the Founding Fathers themselves would have supported that choice are convincing, as is his assertion that the war erupted from economic issues, not slavery. However, his unceasing attacks on Lincoln put readers on the defensive, and when he obsessively hounds a single Lincoln scholar throughout an entire chapter, he seems to be pursuing an academic vendetta rather than any greater understanding.
Intriguing, but the author lacks the tact needed to sway the masses.Pub Date: Oct. 10, 2006
ISBN: 0-307-33841-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Crown Forum
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
