This and Sorensen's Kennedy (p. 860) will continue to stand out long after the discussion of whether or not "instant history" is a valid, or even ethical, form. Schlesinger's book is much more intimate in tone than Sorensen's and its spiced word portraits of the men around Kennedy have drawn the heaviest fire based on the two pre-publication exposures in Life. Yet, it will be for these that future historians will thank him, while today's critics will read him avidly — and then decry him, from huff to howl. Schlesinger obviously did not labor in awe of his President; theirs were equal, atypical backgrounds and they shared many of the same intellectual and social contacts. The many quotations he attributes to Kennedy and his circle show a keen ear for the flash fire of political wit and a taste for invective that was likely to be suppressed in their public utterances. This helps close the distance that has inevitably increased between Kennedy the man and Kennedy the martyr. A Thousand Days is more than a 1000 pages long if you count the index and Schlesinger has isolated the personalities, the election, the Congressional record, the international crises and the domestic issues in long, speculative chapters. He was aware of and particularly good at estimating the Kennedy influence beyond the political. In the arts, American humor, and intellectual as well as general attitudes, the Kennedy style had something going and the author/historian is especially competent to trace it. If Sorensen is the better memorializer, Schlesinger is the better visualizer. Both have written that seldom book — the one you have to read and will probably want at home.
Pub Date: Nov. 29, 1965
ISBN: 0618219277
Page Count: 1124
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1965
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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