Du Maurier began this story with Golden Lads (1975), a study of the young Bacon and his beloved older brother Anthony, ending with Anthony's death in 1601. The present volume follows the mature lawyer, politician, and thinker through the remaining 25 years of his astonishing life. High office had eluded Bacon under Elizabeth; with the accession of James I in 1603 he began his gradual ascent to the Lord Chancellor's woolsack through a succession of lofty legal posts anti convenient friendships with important persons. His rise was curiously intertwined with the ominous issue of royal prerogative and the career of its most stalwart judicial opponent, Bacon's inveterate rival Sir Edward Coke. Attorney-General Bacon and the great Chief Justice of Common Pleas (once rivals for the hand of the same woman) took up opposing—and prophetic—lines of argument as to how far the common law and the judiciary should be servants to the Crown. During the same crowded decades this frail hypochondriac was writing legal works of some importance, revising and expanding his Essays in successive editions, drawing up white papers and propositions for legal reform, and publishing various parts of the encyclopedic scheme he was devising for the restructuring of "philosophy" (i.e., higher learning) in accordance with something like empirical methods. Du Maurier narrates this prodigious career smoothly but glibly, leaving us rather at a loss to account for the Lord Chancellor's stunning (and still controversial) 1621 confession to charges of receiving bribes. Most legal and intellectual issues are digested into trivial pablum, and the frequent coy references to the Shakespearean-authorship question do nothing to reassure anyone of Du Maurier's scholarly judgment. Catherine Drinker Bowen's The Lion and The Throne (1956; a biography of Coke) and Francis Bacon: The Temper of A Man (1963) remain the layman's guides par excellence to this material.
Pub Date: Jan. 21, 1976
ISBN: 1844080749
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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