by Russell Miller ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 9, 2008
Ably shows a writer whose strengths were as prodigious as his weaknesses.
Balanced, highly readable biography of Sherlock Holmes’s phenomenally prolific creator, who began his career as a hardheaded physician and ended it with a daffy devotion to Spiritualism and an adamant advocacy for existence of fairies.
British nonfiction veteran Miller (Behind the Lines: The Oral History of Special Operations in World War II, 2002, etc.) reveals his subject as a talented, extraordinarily complicated man. Conan Doyle (1859–1930) wrote 54 short stories and four novels starring Sherlock Holmes. They earned a fortune but never brought him the high literary standing he craved. His publishers and public mostly tolerated his numerous other novels, histories, tracts and pamphlets—the biography deals directly with most—but they always clamored for more Holmes. Miller’s narrative is firmly traditional, beginning with family background, then proceeding from cradle to grave with pauses for cultural and social history, as well as descriptions of Conan Doyle’s work and travels. The writer had a complex love life. Married to Louisa “Touie” Hawkins in 1885, he later fell in love and established a platonic relationship with a younger woman, Jean Leckie, who virtually joined the family and assumed the role of wife-in-waiting for nine years while Touie slowly died of tuberculosis. Miller is strong on the genesis of Holmes, noting that Conan Doyle properly credited Edgar Allan Poe’s detective Dupin as an early influence. The large, stout author was also an eager athlete, a vigorous player of cricket and golf. Later in his life, he volunteered for active military duty several times but was politely turned down. The sad final section shows a deeply deluded, intransigent Conan Doyle, traveling the world to trumpet the reality of fairies and Spiritualism, committing his fortune and reputation to proving that the dead can speak to the living.
Ably shows a writer whose strengths were as prodigious as his weaknesses.Pub Date: Dec. 9, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-312-37897-4
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2008
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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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