A vast subject confined in a small but well-illuminated room.
The story of life stories, from cave paintings and Gilgamesh to Michael Holroyd and James Frey.
Hamilton may be the best friend biography has ever had. A skilled laborer in the life-story vineyard (Bill Clinton, 2003, etc.), he is also a fierce advocate for the importance of the genre—with some axes to grind. He wonders why the University of Hawaii at Manoa is the only one in the world with a department devoted to the study of biography. He rails against the OED, which he claims has insisted on limiting the definition of biography to written accounts only. Hamilton’s much broader category includes portraits, sculpture, painting, plays, films, TV shows, comic books and much of popular culture. Although he does pause periodically to discuss unconventional forms (Shakespeare’s dramatic studies of kings, for example), he focuses primarily on traditional biographies. Hamilton believes biography serves significant cultural functions. It is a way we learn about the past and (in the West at least) celebrate the primacy of the individual. His text hopscotches through history, staying put now and then to discuss great moments in biography and autobiography: the Gospels, St. Augustine, Plutarch, Raleigh, Rousseau, Boswell, Freud, Strachey and Woolf, who wrote Orlando because she decided that “if print biography could not batter down the doors of English decorum . . . it would have to mask itself as fiction.” Hamilton declares Citizen Kane the most powerful of all biographies, even though fictionalized. He looks hard at forces that oppose the biographer—religion, tradition, prudishness, libel laws, totalitarianism—and casts particular opprobrium on copyright laws that keep permission to publish in the hands of a subject’s surviving relatives. (He does not mention his own struggles with the Kennedys after the 1992 publication of JFK: Reckless Youth.) The author believes that democracy has been the propellant for biography’s rocket-like rise in the last half-century . . . and for biographers’ newfound freedom to write about their subjects’ sex lives. Many illuminating excerpts illustrate the text.
A vast subject confined in a small but well-illuminated room.Pub Date: March 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-674-02466-4
Page Count: 316
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2006
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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