by Seymour Morris Jr. ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 2017
A timely, amusing, and occasionally eye-opening exercise.
On the theory that experience is the best predictor of future performance, Morris (Supreme Commander: MacArthur’s Triumph in Japan, 2014, etc.) examines and evaluates, as any hiring committee might, the resumes of 15 men, all past applicants for the job of president.
To judge the fitness for the Oval Office of figures as towering as Washington and Lincoln, as dubious as William Randolph Hearst, and as little remembered as William Henry Harrison, the author uses four criteria: “accomplishments,” “intangibles,” “judgment,” and “overall” (a summary of all the information known about the candidate). Notwithstanding the intentional diversity of his list, a couple “candidates” appear out of place: the otherwise estimable Gen. George C. Marshall was never seriously considered for Franklin Roosevelt’s vice president, and Jefferson Davis was elected president, yes, but of the Confederacy. Still, the disagreements readers will have with Morris, his methodology, and his assessments are part of the fun of any exercise like this. As he rates the aspirants, the author turns up interesting little nuggets about each: why Jefferson in 1826 thought DeWitt Clinton was the greatest living American and why Lincoln, too, sought to emulate the father of the Erie Canal; how Ronald Reagan devised his own version of shorthand to deliver his seemingly effortless speeches; why Robert Kennedy and Barry Goldwater were perhaps too hot for the presidency, Herbert Hoover and Samuel Tilden, too cold; how Henry Wallace failed to match self-discipline with his prodigious intellect; why Maine’s Bowdoin College awarded an honorary degree to Jefferson Davis two years before the Civil War; how Wendell Willkie, without ever holding public office, captured the Republican nomination; why the Democrats twice denied their top honor to William McAdoo, the most accomplished treasury secretary since Hamilton. Why wisdom trumps experience, judgment beats sheer hard work, broad intelligence bests narrow brilliance—these considerations, too, figure into Morris’ appraisals.
A timely, amusing, and occasionally eye-opening exercise.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-61234-850-6
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Potomac Books
Review Posted Online: Oct. 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2016
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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