Veteran diplomat Brown (The Real Contra War, 2001) provides a revealing look inside the mysterious world of foreign service.
For more than three decades, the author traveled the globe in the service of the United States—first as a Marine, then as a Foreign Service officer, with stops in Latin America, Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, Europe, the Middle East and that most dangerous of locales: Washington, D.C. For most of his journey, his Costa Rica–born wife, Leda, and their four children accompanied him. Brown summarizes his job thusly: “[I]mplementing foreign policies in the field…is exceptionally complex, always challenging and, on occasion, very dangerous.” His career coincidentally began and ended in Nicaragua, where he started as an underage soldier and finished as the head of a secret State Department office aiding the Central American country’s rebels. As Brown enjoyably describes, a diplomat’s job required making the right connections to get things done, but there was a healthy dose of happenstance as well. He stuffs his memoir with memorable anecdotes, and even his chapter headings reveal the human foibles that were often central to political decisions (“Whore Houses, Labor Relations and Coca Cola”; “Fat Colonels, Mau Maus and Chilean Blonds”). However, he never makes his own personal political leanings clear, and he says that’s the way it has to be for a Foreign Service officer: “Republicans think all Foreign Service professionals are left-wing liberals, if not closet Marxists, and most Democrats are certain they’re all right-wing reactionaries, if not out-and-out fascists, so neither believes they’re to be trusted.” The author also uses his collection of photos and memorabilia from his many years of service to help bring his reminiscences to life. Brown is a natural storyteller, and he skillfully shows readers what a truly remarkable career in the diplomatic corps looks like.
An engaging, personal peek into U.S. foreign relations.
Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1481134743
Page Count: 424
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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