Of interest to 20th-century American history buffs and aspiring diplomats.
A well-respected American diplomat looks back on his life and career.
Born in 1930 to a working-class family in Rochester, New York, vanden Heuvel (On His Own: Robert F. Kennedy, 1964-1968, 1970, etc.) grew up in Franklin Roosevelt’s America, and he is one of the greatest champions of FDR’s tidal wave of justice, which he sees as continued during the tenure of Lyndon Johnson. The author attended Deep Springs College, a Western ranch serving as a school to enrich self-governance and develop leadership and public conscience. He continued his education at Cornell University, where he earned a law degree and served as editor-in-chief of the college’s law review. He writes glowingly of his mentors, Roger Baldwin, founder of the American Civil Liberties Union and the International League for Human Rights; and William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the head of the Office of Strategic Services, who gave vanden Heuvel his first position in his law firm. More importantly, Donovan took him as a personal aide when he was appointed ambassador to Thailand, and they were in Saigon to witness the fall of Dien Bien Phu in 1954. The author’s insight into the politics of those fraught times is clear and straightforward, and he provides an interesting look at the civil rights struggles of the 1960s and the “revolution of rising expectations.” Working as a special assistant to Attorney Genereal Robert F. Kennedy, he was tasked with leading school desegregation efforts in Virginia. His days as chair of the New York City Board of Corrections brought the prison crisis of Attica to public view, and as ambassador to the U.N. in Geneva and New York, he delivered a memorable letter decrying the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Though the organization of the book is somewhat scattered, with reproduced speeches dotting the narrative, the author’s career was unquestionably impressive, and his memoir makes for hopeful reading.
Of interest to 20th-century American history buffs and aspiring diplomats.Pub Date: May 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5017-3817-3
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Cornell Univ.
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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