A masterly biography of the redneck messiah who, before he was assassinated in 1935 at age 42, played a leading role on the US political stage. Setting Long and his Louisiana regime in the post- Reconstruction context of America's Deep South, Hair (History/Georgia College) provides an unsparing, albeit scrupulously documented, account of a backwoods pol whose will to power almost defies belief. The author's interpretive analysis of the self-styled Kingfish's rise and violent end represents a persuasive challenge to the standard 1969 reference (Huey Long) by T. Harry Williams, who credited the charismatic Long with a measure of benign intent. By contrast, the author portrays the politician as a calculating control freak, essentially contemptuous of his fellow man, for whom politics was a blood sport. A son of landed yeomanry, Long spent his young manhood as a traveling salesman for patent medicines and other dubious products. Having crammed his way past the bar exam, the high-school dropout practiced law for a while, soon winning a seat on Louisiana's Public Service Commission. The governorship followed, allowing Long to begin turning Louisiana into a personal fiefdom. Playing the patronage game, he rewarded friends and punished enemies, and promoted laws that made Louisiana a virtual police state. Even after surviving impeachment proceedings and moving on to the US Senate in 1932, Long retained his regional as well as local influence. A spellbinding orator, he made no secret of his presidential ambitions. Having cobbled together a populist coalition whose adherents encompassed the radical, racist likes of Gerald L.K. Smith and Fr. Charles E. Coughlin, he had a third-party candidate's plausible chance at the White House. But the dream (or nightmare) died in a hail of gunfire—and Hair leaves little doubt that the country was the better for the untimely demise of a rabble-rousing demagogue. A consistently engrossing portrait of a despot who sowed discontent among the electorate's disaffected and reaped the whirlwind just as he was hitting his stride. (Illustrations—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8071-1700-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1991
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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