A sincere if measured attempt to impart both wisdom and urgency.
The former presidential candidate mines those moments and pet projects easily overlooked during the course of a high-profile career.
Clinton has more former roles, titles, and experiences to account for and reflect on than most. In the opening pages of her latest memoir, she promises a series of conversational snippets that make it “feel like sitting with me at a dinner party.” Thus, the net of content is cast wide—especially given the book’s relatively short length—and jumps between her roles in both personal relationships and presidential administrations and her musings on issues facing America today, like political polarization, the repeal of Roe v. Wade, and threats to democracy posed by Donald Trump. Readers expecting a new intimacy from Clinton will not find it here; her acknowledged “midwestern reticence” erects guardrails to keep her within her comfort zone. Occasionally, she cannot resist reminding readers of what she has been right about all along. Yet Clinton’s understanding of her own aging and dwindling number of “tomorrows” stays some of the temptation to pontificate and prompts her to “open up,” both in pursuing new professional contexts and in giving readers poignant, if small, windows into her personal grief, faith, and intentionality and investment in relationships. Unsurprisingly, persistence and resilience, as shown not only by courageous women worldwide but also by the United States, remain her thematic lighthouses. Rather than a vacant, Pollyannaish cheer, these twin drumbeats pound both above and beneath the book’s subtext, marking a thought-provoking and motivating push-pull between Clinton’s realism, anxiety, and optimism, no longer bound by the lenses and soundbites of campaigns and stump speeches and profoundly significant in the current political moment.
A sincere if measured attempt to impart both wisdom and urgency.Pub Date: Sept. 17, 2024
ISBN: 9781668017234
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2024
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
SEEN & HEARD
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: yesterday
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