by Justin Martin ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 2, 2014
The author’s solid research into the connections of these curiously varied men and women makes this a wonderful story of one...
Walt Whitman (1819-1892) is only the best known of Martin’s (Genius of Place: The Life of Frederick Law Olmsted, 2011, etc.) gallery of the 19th-century bohemians who haunted Pfaff’s Saloon in New York City.
The leader of this boisterous set was Henry Clapp (1814-1875), an irreverent moral relativist who thrilled in playing off his coterie of writers and artists for the best put-downs and bons mots. Clapp’s attitude sprang from his experiences in Paris’ Latin Quarter, where he met the true bohemians who formed the basis of La Vie de Bohème. They sat in Café Momus discussing, rather than producing, their art and drinking strong coffee and stronger alcohol. Mostly, they had no money, no prospects, multiple romances and lots of talk. Ultimately, these circumstances brought Clapp back to the saloon on the corner of Broadway and Bleeker Street to interact with the fascinating crowd he met there night after night. Though Whitman was often there, he was not always with Clapp’s crowd. He also spent time with new friends in the larger room, where one’s sexuality was not a matter of discussion. Many of the figures in Martin’s entertaining cultural history failed miserably, and many died young. Some like actor Edwin Booth (brother to John Wilkes) and humor writer Artemus Ward, left their marks, while others faded away. As they spread across America and the Atlantic, they met writers as diverse as Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. Clapp vigorously promoted Whitman’s Leaves of Grass and gave Twain his first national break in the Saturday Press. Martin truly opens up the characters of these creative, sensitive men, examining their lives before the Civil War and the ways in which they reacted to it.
The author’s solid research into the connections of these curiously varied men and women makes this a wonderful story of one of the world’s odd little cultural cliques.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-0306822261
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: Aug. 3, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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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