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PROMISE AND THE DREAM

THE UNTOLD STORY OF MARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. AND ROBERT F. KENNEDY

The most telling line of this well-crafted and timely story comes from Lewis as well: “They were friends, and didn’t even...

Dual biography of two of the most ardent, inspiring, and complex champions of American civil rights.

The lives of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. were destined to be forever coupled, not least because of their complicated relationships with Bobby’s brother, John F. Kennedy. Here, longtime Vanity Fair journalist Margolick (Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns, 2013, etc.) brings the same insight and cleareyed analysis that he has brought to his storied biographies and racially potent historical analyses. Although the lives of both men have been covered in detail, Margolick does a fine job of not only portraying crucial events—with the help of new interviews and newly unsealed histories and documents—but also plowing through the misty romanticism that still surrounds these men. “It’s instructive sometimes to study the pre-hagiographic histories of saints,” he writes. Here, Kennedy struggles to uncloak his reputation for being “ruthless” even as he has to shoulder the emotional burden of his brother’s assassination. King, meanwhile, “grew more famous, ambitious, revered and inspiring, loathed and threatening, angry, bitter, radical, desperate.” They lived their lives wary of each other, shadowboxing in the public arena, as illustrated by the dramatic historical photographs that punctuate the book. But via Margolick’s account, we learn these men had far more in common than even they thought, including struggles with depression that stand in stark contrast to the optimism they inspired in a nation. While there’s a fatalism that hangs over their arcs, it’s inspiring to see that both men were propelled, even to the end, by the causes of racial equality and social justice. “When these two young men were murdered, something died in all of us,” said civil rights icon John Lewis. “We were robbed of part of our future.”

The most telling line of this well-crafted and timely story comes from Lewis as well: “They were friends, and didn’t even know that they were friends.”

Pub Date: April 3, 2018

ISBN: 978-1-948122-26-9

Page Count: 400

Publisher: RosettaBooks

Review Posted Online: March 19, 2018

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THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS

FROM MEAN STREETS TO WALL STREET

Well-told and admonitory.

Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.

Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.

Well-told and admonitory.

Pub Date: June 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-06-074486-3

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006

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NIGHT

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. 

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.

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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