Outstanding.
From a body of work stretching back seven decades, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian selects 17 essays on characters large and small who illuminate early American history.
Morgan (The Genuine Article: A Historian Looks at Early America, 2004, etc.) offers something new about well-known public heroes, identifying, for example, those issues over which the famously pragmatic Benjamin Franklin refused to compromise. The author shows how John Winthrop’s exhortations to the Bay colonists brought “disagreements to a happy issue,” preventing a Jamestown-style collapse, and why Anne Hutchinson’s dissent, while attractive to our modern sensibilities, posed such a serious threat to the Puritans. He also pens a superb 40-page sketch of William Penn’s character and career. Morgan excels, though, at limning lesser-known figures. He traces the tortuous marital history of Puritan heiress Anna Keayne, examines the Puritan caricature Michael Wigglesworth, assesses the historical reputations of Yale presidents Ezra Stiles and Timothy Dwight and toasts the courage of Giles Corey and Mary Easty, who nearly died for their refusal to submit to Salem’s witchcraft madness. The author also demonstrates that groups can be heroes: the Arawak Indians of Hispaniola, whose demise constitutes the sad first chapter of the European transformation of the Western Hemisphere; the Antifederalists, whose important opposition to the Constitution’s ratification led to the Bill of Rights. This uniformly strong collection boasts an insightful, even startling, observation—“Government requires make-believe”—on nearly every page. If the concluding appreciation of Harvard’s famed historian Perry Miller seems out of place, Morgan may be forgiven for honoring a man who, like Morgan himself, has left us with the “record of a mind” that has thought deeply and creatively about our history.
Outstanding.Pub Date: May 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-393-07010-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
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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