by Jan Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 1, 2000
The peerless travel writer laughs, snarls, glares in contempt, and sheds real tears in a critical but ultimately sentimental biographical essay on the martyred president. After comparing the American adoration of Abraham Lincoln to the sealed plastic, single-portion tubs of grape jelly she took with her toast in roadside coffee shops some 40 years ago on her first visit to the States, Morris (Fifty Years of Europe, 1997, etc.) seems out for blood, or at least better breakfast fare. She finds neither as she visits log cabins of dubious authenticity, Civil War battlefields, public parks, and 19th-century houses spared the wrecking ball because Honest Abe lived and (in a small room across from Ford’s Theater) died in them. Eschewing both Carl Sandburg’s six-volume hagiography and more recent Lincoln scholarship, Morris—quoting mostly from the biased memoirs of Lincoln’s law partner William Herndon and Lincoln’s own letters, poetry, and speeches—discovers what any American high schooler might have told her: that the humble rail-splitter was an astute politician whose law practice represented the railroads— interests, and that the Great Emancipator was initially ambivalent about freeing slaves, possibly because his wife, Mary Todd, came from a slave-owning family. Morris finds it ironic that Lincoln worshipers, from bearded look-alikes at souvenir shops to fat tourists struggling up the marble stairs leading to his Kentucky log- cabin birthplace, ignore the man she’s sure he is: a melancholic, unsophisticated, animal-loving family man whose simple departure speech, which Morris reads at the Springfield railway station where Lincoln left to take up residence at the White House, moves her to tears. “He was essentially a nice man,” she sighs. By the time she visits somber Gettysburg, she is gushing with admiration for a rough-hewn, unrefined, but exquisitely gentle commoner who rose to meet the challenge of his times, and help promote the meddlesome idealism of millennial America. Caustic, patronizing, and misinformed: Lincoln for Dummies.(First serial rights to Preservation)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-684-85515-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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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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