Mostly standard writing advice, minus the bullet points, plus the gleanings from a lifetime of reading and thought.
A veteran editor, teacher, and author assembles some advice for aspiring writers of fiction.
Cohen (Chasing the Sun: The Epic Story of the Star that Gives Us Life, 2010, etc.) tells us that his new volume began “as an outflow of my university teaching,” and in some ways, the lecturer’s tone remains. For each of his points, the author mines his own vast reading, with names like Tolstoy, Twain, Updike, Dickens, Eliot, and other notables appearing continually, and he has a fondness for occasionally declaring what is the best: James Wood is the best book critic today (difficult to argue with that); F.L. Lucas’ Style is the best book about rhythm and writing. Cohen’s myriads of examples are lush and instructive though sometimes quite elementary. He takes a little time, for example, to explain what iambic pentameter is; it’s hard to imagine that the readers of this book would not know such a thing. Organized topically—beginnings, point of view, dialogue, rhythm, sex, endings—the book generally surveys the literary history of the topic, offers some prescriptions and proscriptions, and concludes with some advice for the novice—e.g., “simple clear prose is not the only way to write, but it is the best.” Along the way, Cohen delivers a few sharp jabs at some writers—Michael Holroyd’s writing, he writes, has grown “slipshod”—but for the most part, he is a generous tour guide through his literary world and generally favors positive over negative examples—though there are plenty of the latter. Perhaps most engaging are Cohen’s occasional anecdotes about his own experiences as a writer and editor and—in one extensive case—literary friend: he tells a fine story about how Richard Holmes developed the idea for his Footsteps (1985).
Mostly standard writing advice, minus the bullet points, plus the gleanings from a lifetime of reading and thought.Pub Date: May 31, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9830-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: March 13, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2016
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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