An oddly disjointed work of history.
Journalist Martelle (Detroit: The Biography, 2012, etc.) juxtaposes two American lives anchored in two very different centuries and milieus.
The author grapples for cohesion and relevance in telling the stories of two notable American characters, John Paul Jones (1747-1792) and Horace Porter (1837-1921), whose lives only intersected across a huge swath of history—and after Jones’ death in Paris. The rogue seaman of the American Revolution who made a swashbuckling reputation for challenging the supreme British navy on its own turf, Jones died at age 45 of kidney failure and pneumonia. A Scottish-born Protestant, he had to be buried outside of the city’s Catholic perimeters, in the cemetery of Saint Louis, financed by his wealthy American friend Gouverneur Morris and others. However, since the French Revolution was raging, the cemetery became a dumping ground, and the celebrated American’s resting place was quickly forgotten. Gradually, over a tumultuous century of American history, Jones’ fame grew, thanks largely to published letters by the Revolutionary leaders, biographies and other literary efforts, such as James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Pilot (1823). Unfortunately, Martelle does not extract any material from these sources to provide a more fully fleshed portrait of Jones. Meanwhile, Porter, who was educated at West Point, served as aide to Gen. Grant during the Civil War and was appointed ambassador to France by President William McKinley, was encouraged by fellow patriot President Theodore Roosevelt to pursue the whereabouts of Jones’ body. With his great wealth and connections, Porter could do it: The discovery of the cemetery and the actual digging for the coffin amid all the skeletons make for a fascinating mystery, despite the tertiary slog through assassinations, war with Spain and the Dreyfus Affair.
An oddly disjointed work of history.Pub Date: May 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61374-730-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2014
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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