The brothers Kuntz (Tom is a New York Times editor, Phil, a Wall Street Journal reporter) use journalism as a kind of noble...
Far from stale gossip and bureaucratic tedium, this is a carefully edited and annotated compendium of FBI files on Sinatra, made public under the Freedom of Information Act.
Two years after Sinatra’s death, this abridged version of his 1,275-page dossier is a historian’s hoot for what it reveals about Hoover and his FBI. There are no new revelations about Sinatra, however. Initially considered little more than a seducer of naïve teenaged girls, Sinatra became a concern to the FBI as he grew into his role as the century’s most popular male entertainer—one who befriended (and possibly even cuckolded) US presidents. Beginning with an overlong biographical preface about Sinatra, this parade of letters, internal documents, and transcripts (many with names blotted out by the FBI’s censors, most adorned by caustic comments from Hoover and his cronies) show the Bureau as a greedy collector of lies and worthless innuendo that, when investigated, ended up telling Hoover precisely what he didn’t want to believe (namely, that Sinatra was not a Communist and that he had legitimate medical reasons for being deferred from military service during WWII). In fact, Hoover learned that he had much in common with his nemesis: fierce patriotism, an explosive temper, an inner sentimental streak, and a tendency to remain loyal to friends in low places. By the time Hoover had enough evidence to nail Sinatra on his organized crime connections, Sinatra had become the public champion (and private pimp) of John and Bobby Kennedy. Far from controlling Sinatra, Hoover actually came to the singer’s aid on several occasions, helping to investigate the kidnapping of Frank Jr. and sending his agents on various fool’s errands for him (such as the time he conducted a four-month investigation of the crank who had threatened to blind Sinatra by hitting him in the eye with a poisoned pickle).
The brothers Kuntz (Tom is a New York Times editor, Phil, a Wall Street Journal reporter) use journalism as a kind of noble rot: musty memoranda, under their careful sifting, ferment into a historical morality fable in which celebrity conquers all. (8 b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: July 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8129-3276-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2000
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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