by Tom Wicker ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 3, 2004
In the end, Wicker offers little more than “a nice man with good connections”: perhaps not the worst president, though the...
A readable life, at once respectful and critical, of Bush I, who nursed “what must have been a burning desire to become president of the United States” without formulating any particular plans for what he’d do once he got the job.
Novelist/historian Wicker (Easter Lily, 1998, etc.) bookends his Dwight D. Eisenhower (2002) with this study of Bush père, who, like Ike, “did not offer himself as a proponent of certain issues or of a definite ideology or of any particular policy—such as, say, helping most Americans achieve affordable health care.” Yet, Wicker observes, Bush fought hard to attain office, and fought hard for much of the privilege that would accrue to his children, including the current president. Though he may have been born, in Ann Richards’s famous quip, with a “silver foot in his mouth,” Bush was no stranger to hard work, and Wicker’s account gives reason to admire his accomplishments as a businessman who carved out a small empire for himself in the oil fields of West Texas, to say nothing of his bravery in combat during WWII. Wicker is less inclined to admire Bush’s political career, however; confronted with a notoriously hard-right Texas Republican Party in the age of Goldwater, Bush betrayed his moderate inclinations and “moved almost as far to the right as was Goldwater himself,” denouncing civil rights and then cluelessly wondering why Texas’s black voters did not embrace him. Bush’s subsequent appointments to diplomatic and civil service postings in places such as Beijing and Langley were uneventful, Wicker writes, and his spot on the Reagan ticket was a matter of political expediency; Reagan had to be lobbied hard to endorse Bush’s candidacy once the Gipper’s two terms were up. In office, Bush accomplished almost nothing and couldn’t seem to offer any reason for voters to return him to office—and so they didn’t.
In the end, Wicker offers little more than “a nice man with good connections”: perhaps not the worst president, though the acorn doesn’t fall far from the oak.Pub Date: May 3, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03303-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2004
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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