by Michael Korda ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 16, 2010
Though occasionally fawning, an accessible, textured story of one man who intimately knew the slings and arrows of...
Book-publishing veteran and prolific historian Korda (With Wings Like Eagles: The Untold Story of the Battle of Britain, 2009, etc.) offers a comprehensive, admiring treatment of one of England’s most popular if controversial military celebrities, T.E. Lawrence (1888–1935).
The author does not restrain his enthusiasm for, and even awe of, his subject. He calls Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1927) “one of the great pieces of modern writing about war” and compares him with a dizzying range of characters, from Odysseus to Princess Diana. At first, Korda uses Joseph Campbell’s work of comparative mythology, Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), to provide a framework, then, mercifully, abandons it. The author begins during World War I with the involvement of the diminutive young Lawrence, still in his 20s, already fluent in Arabic and other languages and already an authority on the Middle East. Korda describes military and political maneuvers and then retreats to narrate Lawrence’s complicated birth (his parents were not married), boyhood, education and young manhood. Throughout, the author emphasizes Lawrence’s deeply troubled relationship with his mother, but he also underscores his ferocious work habits, enormously high pain threshold (captured by the enemy, he endured severe beatings and rape) and unique combination of modesty (he refused honors) and pride (he wrote many letters to newspapers and cultivated friendships with George Bernard Shaw, Lady Astor, Thomas Hardy and others). Lawrence’s military and political successes in the Middle East are undeniable, but his postwar life was a disturbing mixture of depression, enormous celebrity, a deep ambivalence about routine military life (he was in and out of the RAF) and sexual confusions. A motorcycle accident killed him at age 46.
Though occasionally fawning, an accessible, textured story of one man who intimately knew the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-171261-6
Page Count: 768
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2010
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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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