An absorbing true story of sexual intrigue, legal battles, filial piety, and social history in 16th-century Germany. Ozment (History/Harvard, Protestants, 1992) recreates the fascinating confrontation between a respected bÅrgermeister and his free-spirited daughter. Hermann BÅschler was a wealthy councilman in the southern German city of Schwabisch Hall. His daughter Anna provoked his wrath and that of the town with her flirtatious and scandalous behavior; in particular, she juggled affairs with two men, one a Jew. When her father discovered Anna's cache of love letters, he resolved to disown her. Anna, in turn, charged that her father was negligent in contracting a proper marriage for her and insisted on claiming her inheritance. So began a battle that lasted over 25 years. The tale unfolds within the context of a Germany driven by the Protestant Reformation, recovering from periodic recurrences of the Black Death, and struggling to confront the overwhelming issues of the early modern age. Ozment, utilizing Anna's love letters and surviving court documents, weaves a complex human story of the woman, her lovers, and her family. No less important as characters are the townspeople, who see Anna as transgressing time-honored norms of filial and sexual behavior. Successfully disowned by her father, an outcast in the community, Anna spent the remainder of her life in a fruitless effort to recover her inhertitance. Ozment clearly examines how Anna's case reflects issues of class and gender, and concludes that ``in that distant age, as in our own, rationality and madness accompanied one another, the one as prominent and real as the other.'' Less convincingly, the author argues that Anna's story reveals that women were not ``powerless victims of male rule,'' but able to define themselves and ``leave their mark on history.'' Undoubtedly, though, the situation of women was more complex than previously thought, and this riveting drama of an ambiguous heroine sheds light on that bygone age. (illustrations, not seen) (History Book Club alternate selection)
Pub Date: March 14, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-13939-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1996
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
