by Harry L. Katz ; The Library of Congress ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 21, 2014
Written with verve, Katz’s history is distinguished from a trove of Twain biographies by its 300 illustrations, including...
A richly illustrated life of an American icon.
Former Library of Congress curator Katz (Civil War Sketch Book, 2012, etc.) has reached deeply into the library’s archives for this commemoration of the enormously popular and prolific author. Besides offering a detailed—if familiar—narrative of Twain’s work, family and personality, Katz traces social, political and economic changes from 1850, when Twain first began publishing, until his death in 1910. After a few years in newspaper work in Hannibal, Missouri, 20-year-old Samuel Clemens set out to become a steamboat pilot on the Mississippi, but when the Civil War stopped river traffic, he decided to avoid the conflict by heading West. In Nevada and California, he became a miner, prospector and newspaper reporter, all while writing his own stories. His tall tale “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” published in 1865 under his pen name, won accolades, leading to a multicity lecture tour. A political and cultural gadfly, Twain “challenged monarchies, autocracies, plutocracies, and leaders of the civilized world to free, educate, and employ their subjects,” writes Katz. “He railed against his Christian God…for fostering ignorance and suffering, creating havoc in the lives of humankind.” He became “a cultural lightning rod” and an outspoken shaper of public opinion. Twain loved performing, but he also depended on tours for money. Notoriously bad with finances, he repeatedly made unsound investments and ended up in debt, despite his book earnings. By the time The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn appeared in 1885—generating immediate controversy—Twain had already cemented his reputation with Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), The Gilded Age (1873), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), and volumes of stories and sketches.
Written with verve, Katz’s history is distinguished from a trove of Twain biographies by its 300 illustrations, including photographs, cartoons and artwork, drawn from the LOC’s inestimable collection.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-316-20939-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2014
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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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