Excellent portraits of Faulkner’s falls from various horses—and his determination, no matter how broken, to remount. (8 pp....
Some fresh evidence but a conventional treatment of the Yoda of Yoknapatawpha County.
As the author graciously acknowledges, anyone who writes about Faulkner (1897–1962) must pay homage (and assign many endnote numbers) to Joseph Blotner, whose two-volume Faulkner: A Biography (1974) remains foundational. But 30 years have passed, and Parini (Robert Frost: A Life, 1999, etc.) is an important and gifted biographer, and Faulkner, as Parini realizes, was a man with “many thousands of selves.” Here, Parini deals with the dominant ones. The organization is traditional (one would think Faulkner might inspire in his biographer some convolution, some multiple points-of-view): strictly chronological, with later chapters arranged in a common pattern—Faulkner’s personal life, the composition of his most recent book, the responses of the contemporaneous reviewers (Clifton Fadiman attacked virtually the entire canon of the future Nobel laureate), and then Parini’s own exegesis, sometimes animated (sometimes larded) with the commentary of other scholars. Parini deals directly with Faulkner’s human weaknesses—his alcoholism, his marital infidelities with ever-younger women (Parini is much more critical than Blotner of Estelle Faulkner, the writer’s wife), and his racial attitudes. As Parini notes, Faulkner’s comments during the 1950s sound uncomfortable to northern (or, maybe, humane) ears; he concludes that the great writer simply could not rise above his place and time—although he was considered racially radical in Mississippi. We see Faulkner in Oxford, Hollywood, New York, Charlottesville, the world. Like his rival Hemingway, he lied about his war record. But he was an accomplished horseman (despite many grievous falls later in life), an amateur pilot, an eager sailor, a voracious reader of novels. Parini shows in bright relief the fierce discipline that enabled Faulkner to produce major works in a short time (As I Lay Dying he wrote in 47 days) and recognizes the progressively declining quality of his work.
Excellent portraits of Faulkner’s falls from various horses—and his determination, no matter how broken, to remount. (8 pp. b&w photos, not seen)Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-621072-0
Page Count: 496
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2004
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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