by William E. Pemberton ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1997
A volume that will be welcomed by anyone with an interest in the Reagan presidency so overwhelming it has not yet been sated by the glut of books on this subject. To be fair, this could serve as a reasonable introduction to Reagan's presidency for readers not already familiar with the basic events. But essentially, Pemberton (History/Univ. of Wisconsin, La Crosse) has produced an abridged encyclopedia of Ronald Reagan. On one hand there is an apparently Herculean effort to use every available written source, from unpublished papers to first-person accounts to scholarly secondary works, in a brief yet comprehensive survey of the major events of Reagan's adult life. On the other hand, there is the predictable result that not a single event receives satisfactory attention. Pemberton's perspective is balanced and serious throughout, but even objective description can be misleading when it is too brief. Devoting less than a single page to such complex events as the origins of the savings-and-loan fiasco or the evolution of the 1986 Tax Reform Act can create the impression that a topic has been addressed even though essential information is missing. Even where details are added to the narration, the presentation is unsatisfying. For example, Pemberton describes Reagan's post-inaugural signing of an order to freeze hiring of governmental employees as evidence of his mastery of symbolic politics. However, throughout the book we are told that Reagan himself rarely made decisions, and never about details. Was he the author of this action, then, or simply a performer? Without addressing this question, the description has little depth. In an arena already crowded with juicy first-person exposÇs and academic diatribes, a detached, surface-level survey isn't going to generate much interest. (16 pages photos, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-7656-0095-1
Page Count: 328
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1997
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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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