Of much interest to students of political history, and sure to excite discussion in academic circles.
A carefully researched study of a curious, well-hidden episode in American presidential history.
Shortly after the death of his wife Ellen in 1914, newly elected president Woodrow Wilson met and quickly fell in love with society matron Edith Bolling Galt, described by former New York Times reporter and historian Levin as a woman of “opulent figure and commanding air.” Edith, who soon married Wilson, made for an unusually diligent First Lady, studying world events and Wilson's own voluminous writing, and familiarizing herself with the intricacies of party politics. Their pillow talk evidently touched on matters of state as much as anything more personal, as when Wilson “discussed with Edith his apprehensions about the serious effects of [Secretary of State William Jennings] Bryan’s resignation on the country and on his administration” and the wording of his official remarks on the U-boat sinking of the Lusitania. (The two also shared a vigorous loathing for the prospect of women gaining the vote. “Nothing in the course of those tragic years of war,” writes Levin, “seemed personally to repel Edith or Wilson so much as the women activists who picketed for suffrage.”) When, midway through his second term, Wilson suffered a massive stroke, Edith was well up to the task of serving as his proxy—a role that the White House steadfastly denied, insisting that the president was merely unwell, and remained fully in control. Edith kept up her side of the ruse, but, imperious and fiercely loyal, she also managed to alienate politicians already opposed to Wilson's programs, chief among them Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Had Wilson ceded control to the vice president instead of retaining it through his wife, Levin suggests, then he might have been successful in gaining support for the League of Nations instead of enduring a disastrous political defeat.
Of much interest to students of political history, and sure to excite discussion in academic circles.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-1158-8
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2001
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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