by Walter Mondale with David Hage ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 5, 2010
An absorbing insider’s view of more than 50 years of U.S. history.
Former Vice President Mondale calls upon his five decades of experience in public office to address today’s dangerously polarized political process.
In 1964, when the author came to Washington to fill Hubert Humphrey’s vacated Senate seat, “[a]cross the South, African-Americans couldn’t eat at a lunch counter, couldn’t drink from a public drinking fountain, often couldn’t register to vote.” The Cold War was also a frightening reality, and “nearly 20 percent of Americans lived in poverty.” Liberals in both parties fought together against Southern Democrats and Goldwater Republicans to pass civil-rights legislation. Mondale attributes ending the war in Vietnam to intervention by Senate liberals, which finally forced Lyndon Johnson and, later, Richard Nixon to address the increasing debacles on the ground. The author also examines the significant role of the bipartisan Senate commission—on which he served—in bringing Nixon to account on Watergate and its attendant criminal activities. The author deplores the failure of the Senate to conduct a similar investigation of the actions of the Bush/Cheney administration for what he believes to have been constitutional violations—attempting to use the president’s role as commander-in-chief to “set policy without answering to anyone but themselves,” and employing torture in defiance of the Geneva Accords. Though Mondale argued against many of President Carter’s decisions, he believes that history has yet to give Carter his due. It was Carter, he notes, not Reagan, who first cut back on government programs and “deregulated the airline industry, the trucking industry, and the prices of oil and gas.”
An absorbing insider’s view of more than 50 years of U.S. history.Pub Date: Oct. 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5866-1
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
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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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