Ambitious in scope and rooted in solid storytelling.
A sweeping history of “the place where the United States worked out its extraordinary national debate over immigration for over three decades.”
Approximately 12 million immigrants passed through Ellis Island from 1892 to 1924, writes Cannato (History/Univ. of Massachusetts, Boston; The Ungovernable City: John Lindsay and His Struggle to Save New York, 2001). The last immigrant was processed there in 1954, and Ellis Island is now a national monument. The author reaches back to the island’s beginnings in the early 19th century, when, then named Gibbet Island, it served as a venue for hanging convicted pirates. Cannato then chronicles the many different people—immigrants, immigration officials, politicians and others—who made Ellis Island what it was in the early 20th century, delving into the stories of several important individuals lost to mainstream history. These include Prescott Farnsworth Hall, founder of the 19th-century Immigration Restriction League, and Louis Post, who, as acting Secretary of Labor in 1920, prevented the deportation of several individuals during an early Red Scare. Cannato also addresses the long-lasting political debate over immigration in the United States, which was often rooted in economic concerns, particularly during the Depression. In one fascinating section, the author looks at two contradictory 1892 reports, commissioned by Benjamin Harrison’s administration, on the plight of Russian Jewish immigrants. One report discussed in detail how the immigrants came to America to flee brutal persecution, while another claimed they were simply paupers and criminals scheming to take jobs away from “native-born” workingmen. Indeed, such bigotry is an unfortunately common theme. Cannato describes an 1896 editorial cartoon that shows the xenophobia that faced new arrivals—a crude sketch of a sickly immigrant carrying baggage marked “Poverty,” “Disease,” “Superstition” and “Anarchy.” Telling details illuminate the vastness of the immigrant experience. So many people came through Ellis Island in 1906, for example, that “it witnessed 327 deaths, 18 births, 2 suicides, and 508 marriages.”
Ambitious in scope and rooted in solid storytelling.Pub Date: June 9, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-074273-7
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2009
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.
Atlanticsenior 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
Unsurprising but perfectly competent and seamlessly of a piece with her Living History (2003). And will Hillary run? The...
Former Secretary of State Clinton tells—well, if not all, at least what she and her “book team” think we ought to know.
If this memoir of diplomatic service lacks the preening self-regard of Henry Kissinger’s and the technocratic certainty of Dean Acheson’s, it has all the requisite evenhandedness: Readers have the sense that there’s not a sentence in it that hasn’t been vetted, measured and adjusted for maximal blandness. The news that has thus far made the rounds has concerned the author’s revelation that the Clintons were cash-strapped on leaving the White House, probably since there’s not enough hanging rope about Benghazi for anyone to get worked up about. (On that current hot-button topic, the index says, mildly, “See Libya.”) The requisite encomia are there, of course: “Losing these fearless public servants in the line of duty was a crushing blow.” So are the crises and Clinton’s careful qualifying: Her memories of the Benghazi affair, she writes, are a blend of her own experience and information gathered in the course of the investigations that followed, “especially the work of the independent review board charged with determining the facts and pulling no punches.” When controversy appears, it is similarly cushioned: Tinhorn dictators are valuable allies, and everyone along the way is described with the usual honorifics and flattering descriptions: “Benazir [Bhutto] wore a shalwar kameez, the national dress of Pakistan, a long, flowing tunic over loose pants that was both practical and attractive, and she covered her hair with lovely scarves.” In short, this is a standard-issue political memoir, with its nods to “adorable students,” “important partners,” the “rich history and culture” of every nation on the planet, and the difficulty of eating and exercising sensibly while logging thousands of hours in flight and in conference rooms.
Unsurprising but perfectly competent and seamlessly of a piece with her Living History (2003). And will Hillary run? The guiding metaphor of the book is the relay race, and there’s a sense that if the torch is handed to her, well….Pub Date: June 10, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4767-5144-3
Page Count: 656
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 13, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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