It's a great Sunday for book reviews. Here are a few:
CHASING THE FLAME: Sergio Vieira de Mello and The Fight to Save the World by Samantha Power (Penguin) is reviewed in the Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle. James Mann in the Post finds that "The strength of the book lies in Power's use of Vieira de Mello's life (and death) as a well-placed window on the international community's successes and failures."
CHASING THE FLAME: Sergio Vieira de Mello and The Fight to Save the World by Samantha Power (Penguin) is reviewed in the Washington Post and the San Francisco Chronicle. James Mann in the Post finds that "The strength of the book lies in Power's use of Vieira de Mello's life (and death) as a well-placed window on the international community's successes and failures."They Knew They Were Right: The Rise of the Neocons, by Jacob Heilbrunn (Doubleday) is reviewed in the Chicago Tribune. On Iraq, Heilbrunn writes: "Unlike the Vietnam-era generation of Democrats, the neocons show no signs of remorse for the disaster they have created."
The New York Times finds that RIGHTEOUS WARRIOR: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism by William A. Link (St. Martin’s Press) will be "the go-to biography of Helms for some time."
The New York Times finds that RIGHTEOUS WARRIOR: Jesse Helms and the Rise of Modern Conservatism by William A. Link (St. Martin’s Press) will be "the go-to biography of Helms for some time."
BASIC BROWN: My Life and Our Times by Willie Brown (Simon & Schuster), according to Matt Bai in the New York Times, is "an illuminating, if one-sided, story about the arc of politics in California and much of the rest of the country during the last quarter of the 20th century."
Maurice Isserman in the New York Times reviews DEFYING DIXIE: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights, 1919-1950 by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore (W. W. Norton & Company). A great photo of the amazing Pauli Murray, who dominates the book, fills the print edition.
Also in the NY Times, THE RACE CARD: How Bluffing About Bias Makes Race Relations Worse by Richard Thompson Ford (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) gets a sympathetic review from Orlando Patterson, while Jill Nelson's review of SELLOUT: The Politics of Racial Betrayal by Randall Kennedy (Pantheon Books) and A BOUND MAN: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win by Shelby Steele, finds them to "have a Rip Van Winkle feel to them," so that they "tell us more about what has been than what lies ahead."
Finally, reviewed in the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Sun, a novel(!) about Frantz Fanon: Fanon, by John Edgar Wideman (HOUGHTON MIFFLIN).
