Du Maurier's final book (she died last April) is both a personal memoir and a love letter to Cornwall, which served as inspiration for—and setting of—much of her popular fiction (Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, etc.). In 1926, teen-aged Daphne and her mother and sisters took their first extended visit to the region, buying as odd Alpine-style house overlooking Fowey harbor. Daphne befriended the locals, watched ships come and go in the harbor, and drank tea with sailors. On a walk up the river, she found the hulk of an abandoned schooner, the Jane Slade: her musings about its history became the core of her first novel, The Loving Spirit. An army major who loved the book headed to Cornwall to meet its author: within months of their first date—a spray-drenched outing on his launch—they were engaged. Years passed, du Maurier's atmospheric novels became popular favorites, she continued to explore. One of her favorite walk destinations was an ancient, now empty house, set deep in the woods and surrounded by scarlet rhododendrons, which would serve as the model for Manderley, the great house in Rebecca Here, Du Maurier writes of all this with passion: it was in Cornwall, she says, that "I found myself both as a writer and a person." And she intersperses reminiscences with brief excerpts from her novels—some of which stand on their own, some of which don't. Although the text is probably of interest mostly to hard-core fans, more than a hundred truly gorgeous photographs broaden the appeal: prospective travelers will find itinerary inspiration, and anyone who loves the outdoors may relish a quick browse through the misty moors, seascapes, and woods of this wild and peaceful region.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1989
ISBN: 0718134788
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1989
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
