As with anything by Buckley, it is fluent and gossipy (the scene involving Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand is a howler), fun...
Two conservative icons meet in a well-considered book, as they often did in life.
Buckley (The Rake, 2007, etc.), who recently passed away at the age of 82, opens with a charming anecdote of an adventure he and Barry Goldwater shared in Antarctica, long after the latter’s unsuccessful bid for the White House in 1964. Ever the scholar—though that was not part of his public persona—Goldwater took the occasion to discourse on ice and Antarctica’s abundance thereof. “There is everything there, potentially: the control of the weather; the answer to the fresh-water problem,” Goldwater expounded. “A vat of energy greater than the known supply of the world’s oil. If I had been elected president, you’d have seen it all come to life.” Buckley knew something of that bid, having engineered the making of Goldwater’s soi-disant autobiography The Conscience of a Conservative. One impetus for that book was Richard Nixon, who “had the grit and skill of a seasoned politician” and was the GOP’s only real possibility in the 1960 race against John F. Kennedy, but who failed to stir Republicans at the convention, much less the rest of the American people. Goldwater, Buckley and his conservative colleagues at the National Review, had the ability to stir emotions—though in directions they might not have foreseen when they commissioned Brent Bozell to ghost-write Conscience in 1959. That book, Buckley notes, came in short and late, but it was a hit all the same, and it afforded a series of talking points for Republicans for the next four years. This book is as much a history of the rightward drift of the GOP, which allowed the likes of Reagan and Bush II into office, as it is of Goldwater himself.
As with anything by Buckley, it is fluent and gossipy (the scene involving Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand is a howler), fun to read and newsworthy.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-465-00836-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
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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