A concise, lucid tour of the writings and wide-ranging ideas of the American regarded in many quarters as “the founder of the modern conservative movement.” Person (Senior Editor, Gale Research) argues, however, that Russell Kirk (1918-94) should be viewed not as an ideologue but as a man of letters. It’s true that his 1953 study The Conservative Mind identified a line of conservative thought stretching back to 18th-century England, isolated certain social and political theories that could be termed “conservative,” and asserted the continuing relevance of a coherent body of thought opposed to large government and insisting on the moral primacy (and responsibilities) of the individual. But Kirk, Person points out, steered clear of any deep involvement in Republican politics. He was, first and foremost, a writer, producing during a lengthy career “32 books, 800 essays, book reviews, and articles, and more than 3,000 newspaper and magazine columns.” His books, some of them pugnacious in their historical assertions and contemporary criticisms, included biographies (Edmund Burke), histories (The Roots of American Order), literary and social criticism (Enemies of the Permanent Things, Eliot and His Age), political theory (A Program for Conservatives), and critiques of contemporary education (Decadence and Renewal in the Higher Learning). Person devotes chapters to each of these areas, explicating Kirk’s theories in these fields while stressing the extent to which each was part of an ambitious attempt to apply conservative principles to most elements of social life. A brief but admiring sketch of Kirk’s life stresses the extent to which he practiced the humane conservatism he preached. The subtitle is somewhat confusing: This is not so much a biography of a conservative’s thoughts as a thoughtful analysis of the arguments advanced in each of Kirk’s major books. Given Kirk’s influence on the concepts that many contemporary conservatives claim to embrace, his work will surely continue to be both influential and controversial. Person offers an excellent guide to his legacy. (15 b&w photos)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-56833-131-2
Page Count: 235
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1999
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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