Pretty prose and a pleasing subject for lovers of literary gossip, but Roiphe doesn’t come up with any real revelations...
Tidily composed, broadly researched examination of seven unconventional early modern marriages.
Cultural critic and novelist Roiphe (Still She Haunts Me, 2001, etc.) is drawn to artists who flourished between the two world wars because they were torn between Victorian and modernist sensibilities, their unions subject to conflicts and contradictions not unfamiliar to couples in our own era. Acknowledging her subject’s “natural prurience” only to brush aside doubts (“Why should it be prurient? Marriage is perpetually interesting.”), she delves eagerly into the intimate lives and letters of those in marital conflict and revels in their posturing. Inveterate womanizer H.G. Wells, for example, idolized his stay-at-home wife Jane even while carrying on with Rebecca West and asserting in his work the value of free love. Ailing, ethereal short-story author Katherine Mansfield and critic John Middleton Murry enjoyed a curiously chaste, childlike marriage; they lived largely apart, so their relationship remained abstract and purely romantic. By sheer force of her generous personality, Virginia Woolf’s sister Vanessa was able to maintain her marriage to Clive Bell, nurture three children and keep several lovers around her at the same time. Aristocratic hostess Ottoline Morrell was shaken by the revelation of her husband Philip’s infidelity, even though her own numerous affairs included a long-term entanglement with Bertrand Russell. Novelist Radclyffe Hall had been faithful to Una Troubridge for 18 years when she became besotted with a Russian nurse and persuaded them both to join her in a tense “trio lesbienne” that endured for more than a decade. Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby weren’t lovers, but Brittain found more happiness living with her girlhood friend than with husband George Gordon Catlin. Memoirist and novelist Elizabeth Von Arnim, today less well known than the others, also favored rule-breaking alliances.
Pretty prose and a pleasing subject for lovers of literary gossip, but Roiphe doesn’t come up with any real revelations about some very familiar figures.Pub Date: July 3, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-385-33937-7
Page Count: 342
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2007
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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