A majestic, authoritative multigenerational saga.
A family’s history chronicles the history of the nation.
Journalist and biographer Meier draws on hundreds of hours of interviews and prodigious archival research to craft an absorbing narrative following four generations of one of America’s most prominent families. Men take the center stage: Patriarch Lazarus Morgenthau (1815-1897), a German Jew who arrived in New York in 1866; his formidable son Henry, a man with “outsized ambition” and a “drive for self-perfection”; Henry Jr., secretary of the treasury under Franklin Roosevelt; and finally eminent lawyer Robert, who died in 2019. Lazarus’ many financial failings and mental instability proved to be burdens on his family, most heavily on Henry, the middle of his seven sons. Hardworking and determined, Henry graduated from Columbia Law School and set up a law firm with friends. He proceeded to make a series of astute real estate investments—buying and flipping properties in Manhattan—and became one of the wealthiest men in Gilded Age America. Wealth bought him influence, as well. A supporter of Woodrow Wilson, he was appointed ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, where, Meier writes, he witnessed with alarm the Armenian massacre, “mass murder on a scale the world had never seen.” Henry’s only son was unlike his father. Probably dyslexic, he struggled in school. “Burdened by an indecisive nature and weak self-esteem, he desperately wanted to prove himself,” which he did, amply, in his service to FDR. For 30 years, the New York Times noted at his death, “Mr. Morgenthau was Mr. Roosevelt’s confidant, cranky conscience, intensely loyal colleague, and unabashed, but occasionally outraged, admirer.” Robert, appointed by John F. Kennedy as the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, became “the most powerful federal prosecutor in New York City.” Meier recounts his challenges, losses, and successes as he worked to “redraw the boundaries of power in New York” during a career “without precedent in the history of American law enforcement.”
A majestic, authoritative multigenerational saga.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6885-2
Page Count: 1072
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: July 26, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.
Documenting perilous times.
In his most recent behind-the-scenes account of political power and how it is wielded, Woodward synthesizes several narrative strands, from the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel to the 2024 presidential campaign. Woodward’s clear, gripping storytelling benefits from his legendary access to prominent figures and a structure of propulsive chapters. The run-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is tense (if occasionally repetitive), as a cast of geopolitical insiders try to divine Vladimir Putin’s intent: “Doubt among allies, the public and among Ukrainians meant valuable time and space for Putin to maneuver.” Against this backdrop, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham implores Donald Trump to run again, notwithstanding the former president’s denial of his 2020 defeat. This provides unwelcome distraction for President Biden, portrayed as a thoughtful, compassionate lifetime politico who could not outrace time, as demonstrated in the June 2024 debate. Throughout, Trump’s prevarications and his supporters’ cynicism provide an unsettling counterpoint to warnings provided by everyone from former Joint Chief of Staff Mark Milley to Vice President Kamala Harris, who calls a second Trump term a likely “death knell for American democracy.” The author’s ambitious scope shows him at the top of his capabilities. He concludes with these unsettling words: “Based on my reporting, Trump’s language and conduct has at times presented risks to national security—both during his presidency and afterward.”
An engrossing and ominous chronicle, told by a master of the form.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2024
ISBN: 9781668052273
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2024
IN THE NEWS
PERSPECTIVES
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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