A sobering, solidly researched portrait of the politically adept ``twisted fanatic'' who gained a majority of white votes in two statewide Louisiana races. A New Orleans Times-Picayune reporter who covered Duke's senatorial and gubernatorial campaigns from 1990 to 1992, Bridges speculates that Duke, a junior high school outcast whose father was often absent and whose mother was often drunk, found order and release in Nazi ideology. The rest of his book covers Duke's past, including his swastika-bedecked 1970 picket of lawyer William Kunstler, his telegenic plastic surgery, and his long association with the Ku Klux Klan. Bridges notes right-wing allies disgusted by Duke's womanizing; finds a former girlfriend who reports Duke's enthusiastic trip to a Nazi death camp; and discovers Duke's use of campaign funds for personal use. But Duke's more tempered, populist rhetoric, accompanied by attacks on (black) crime and welfare recipients in the state, won him a post as state representative in 1989. In kaleidoscopic style, Bridges ably portrays the strategies and players in Duke's subsequent bids for senator and for governor, when a massive counterattack, centered less on Duke's views than on his potential negative economic effect on the state (because of threatened boycotts), ensured his defeat. With many of his sentiments co-opted by Pat Buchanan, Duke's 1992 presidential bid fizzled, but he may rise again as a radio talk-show host. Duke's mesmerizing fervor deserves a portrait like Marshall Frady's Wallace. Until that biography arrives, this will be a vital resource. (40 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: May 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-87805-678-5
Page Count: 308
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1994
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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