culturally rich. Many readers will hope for a sequel.
The Russian-French-American painter and writer (Voices in the Snow, not reviewed, etc.) sketches her life and extensive
acquaintances from 1935 to 1975. The cosmopolitan Carlisle was born into a distinguished Russian family living in France. Her grandfather Leonid Andreyev was a leading pro-Soviet writer; her uncle Daniel was a mystical poet tortured and imprisoned by Stalin’s henchmen; he died shortly after a long term in the Gulag. She writes vividly of her coming-of-age and adult years in Paris, where she met and married Henry Carlisle, the American literary scholar, editor, novelist, and her eventual coauthor (The Idealists, 1999). He was descended from an old-line Protestant family in Nantucket, where the couple moved before the island became chic. Despite many descriptions of the natural world and the author’s in-laws, the Nantucket pages are far less interesting than Carlisle’s last major section, covering the 1950s and '60s, when the couple and their son, Michael, lived in New York City. Even though she resists the reigning school of abstract expressionism, the introverted, aesthetically independent Carlisle manages to be in the thick of things in the New York art world, getting to know such figures as Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko, as well as literary stars Robert Lowell and Norman Mailer. Unfortunately, except when she recounts her romance with Henry, Carlisle is reserved about her feelings and her family life, and sometimes slights important details in describing events and personalities. In an otherwise fascinating section, she describes how she and Henry came to represent Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn with Western publishers during the early 1970s and to translate part of The Gulag Archipelago, only to see the Nobel laureate turn furiously on them for what he felt were translating and publishing errors. Yet she never explains just what went wrong. While a significant number of passages here seem too cursory, Carlisle’s life emerges as stimulating, self-aware, and
culturally rich. Many readers will hope for a sequel.Pub Date: March 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-312-25245-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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