by Scott Martelle ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2015
A curious portrait of a celebrity nonentity caught up in the throes of history.
Martelle (The Admiral and the Ambassador: One Man’s Obsessive Search for the Body of John Paul Jones, 2014, etc.) explores the troubled life of a key yet little-known character in the Abraham Lincoln assassination drama.
A journeyman journalist and author whose historical interests range far and wide, the author here conjures the spirit of an English-born hatter and Union soldier, Thomas “Boston” Corbett, who thanked Providence for guiding his fatal shot to the neck of John Wilkes Booth after the manhunt in April 1865. As a young apprentice plying his trade in Manhattan, Corbett was most likely exposed to the mercury-based compounds used in the felt at the time, which might explain some of the classic symptoms of paranoia he later exhibited (and which gave rise to the expression “mad as a hatter”). After the death of his young wife and a descent into heavy drinking, Corbett was redeemed by temperance Christians and moved to Boston to become a proselytizer and street preacher for the Methodist Church. He followed a bizarre self-castration with his baptism in the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1858, when he took the first name Boston. A fervent abolitionist, Corbett signed up for New York’s 12th Regiment in 1861, then later joined the 16th New York Cavalry, based in northern Virginia, an important spot in the manhunt for Lincoln’s assassin. (Unfortunately, there is no map to elucidate the geography of the manhunt.) At the right place at the right time, Corbett shot Booth through the slats of the tobacco shed where the assassin was hiding, apparently drawing his rifle to fire at the Union soldiers. Corbett won fame rather than censure for the shooting, allowing him a small slice of the reward and an Army pension. He eventually slipped into delusional behavior, and his death is shrouded in mystery.
A curious portrait of a celebrity nonentity caught up in the throes of history.Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-61373-018-8
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2015
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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 Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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