A man with Lincoln’s beliefs could never win a presidential election today, but as portrayed in these pages he could very...
Honest Abe was a white supremacist, a trade protectionist, a pro-industrialist—in short, a Henry Clay Whig whose greatest contribution to history was his insistence that the experiment in American freedom had relevance for the rest of the planet.
Neo-con Lind (Vietnam: The Necessary War, 1999, etc.), a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, administers a much overdue beating to the vast carpet of Lincoln studies. As he illustrates throughout this corrective work, the complex Lincoln of history has gradually been simplified into a 1960s liberal; the Boy Who Read by Candlelight, the Young Man Who Split Rails, the Great Emancipator, the Benevolent Big Brother in the Fraternity of Man. But the author demonstrates that Lincoln believed blacks were inferior to whites and that the races shouldn’t mix. He thought long and planned hard for the transportation of American blacks to colonies in Africa or Central America (or even Texas); he freed slaves only in the states that had seceded, and only after those states refused to rejoin the Union. Credit for emancipation, Lind writes, properly ought to go to the intransigent Southern leaders who forced Lincoln’s hand. The author reminds us that Lincoln wished mainly to preserve the Union and to adhere to the Founding Fathers’ principles (including deism: the 16th president had little use for traditional Christianity). Lind is most interesting and convincing in his long discussion of Lincoln’s place in the history of American’s emerging racial attitudes. Other sections are primarily cut-and-paste rehashes, not particularly well buttressed by numerous endnotes of the “as quoted in” variety. The text also slows down when the author discusses trade, tariffs, immigration and Reconstruction. And some readers may raise eyebrows at his implication that the current President Bush is a scion of Lincoln, at least as far as the extension of freedom is concerned.
A man with Lincoln’s beliefs could never win a presidential election today, but as portrayed in these pages he could very well get shot.Pub Date: May 17, 2005
ISBN: 0-385-50739-9
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
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
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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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