Again, as in Cruising Speed (1971), Buckley takes us day by day, sometimes hour by hour, through a week or so in his busy, busy life—in this case eight days from the fall of 1981. There is lots of National Review business, of course, including the consideration of an expensive lease renewal. ("I ponder the extraordinary hold on you that a property, and an area, can develop.") There are a couple of speeches to prepare and deliver, letters to answer, phone calls to parry. Buckley muses on his reasons for writing, for working hard: "Why do I do so much? I expect that the promptings issue from a subtle dialectical counterpoint. Of what? Well, the call of recta ratio, and the fear of boredom." (He then goes on, patronizingly, to explain what recta ratio means—and to consider the "appeal of generic Latin terms.") He reminisces—about a sailing trip with Ronald Reagan, Jr., about his prep school, about his brief CIA stint, about a column in which he mistakenly maligned Pat Boone. ("I was terribly grieved at the hurt I had done him," Buckley concludes, but his description of the incident is actually blithe, insensitive, and self-aggrandizing.) He tapes television's Firing Line, gets a phone call from "my old friend the commander-in-chief," sails with David Niven and publisher Sam Vaughan, heaps praise on assorted friends and family, plugs several of his books, goes to Mass, wrestles with a few current issues, carries on a number of little feuds. And some of this, perhaps, may engage those easily dazzled by name-droppings—or by little peeks into Life with the Buckleys. ("I completed my notes, and are the perfect chicken sandwich Gloria brought me, with a glass of cool white wine. Pat came in, en route to her lunch, and we discussed the weekend plans, and she told me now don't forget that my black tie and cummerbund were in the pocket of my tux, and I promised I'd remember, and walked down the stairs with her, saw her out, and dangled for a minute over the harpsichord.") But, while Buckley's self-congratulation can be marginally palatable when mixed with a story (as in Atlantic High or Airborne), here it's undiluted. So most readers will probably find this tedious at best, sleekly loathsome at worst—especially since, in contrast to the fairly stylish Cruising Speed, it's sloppily written (p. 169: "It was all great fun"; p. 171: "All this was great fun") and virtually without texture.
Pub Date: Aug. 12, 1983
ISBN: 0316114499
Page Count: 262
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1983
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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