by Andrew Lycett ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 4, 2004
Scrupulously researched but overly detailed.
The British biographer of Ian Fleming and Rudyard Kipling memorializes the chaotic and abbreviated existence of the 20th century’s most Romantic poet.
Born in 1914, in Swansea, Wales, to a socially ambitious schoolmaster and a voluble former seamstress, the precocious Dylan Thomas began writing sophisticated English poetry at the age of 10 or 12. In his teens, on summer visits to his mother’s Welsh-speaking relatives at Fernhill, the family farm for which one of his best-loved poems was named, he discovered rural Welsh traditions and began to mix English forms with Welsh images and rhythms, for which he later became famous. He also began to drink, and the drinking never slackened. At 22, after publishing his first book (18 Poems), he wed Caitlin Macnamara, the beautiful, wild, hard-drinking young mistress of painter Augustus John; and so began one of the era’s stormiest, most violent literary marriages. For the rest of Thomas’s short life, until his death from alcohol poisoning in Greenwich Village in 1953, he and Caitlin traveled, drank, fought, cadged money, cheated on each other publicly and obsessively, and made increasingly squalid scenes on three continents. That Thomas also created a body of masterful, if sometimes opaque, lyrical poetry and performed it beautifully on stage and radio explains his extraordinary and lasting popular notoriety. His best-known work, Under Milk Wood, not quite complete when he died, extended his life’s drama for a little while, as friends, handlers, and Caitlin all stormed his New York hotel room, vying for possession of the poet’s last, great work.
Scrupulously researched but overly detailed.Pub Date: June 4, 2004
ISBN: 1-58567-541-5
Page Count: 434
Publisher: Overlook
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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