Renowned biographer Randall (Thomas Jefferson, 1993, etc.) and wife Nahra, an award-winning poet, here offer fascinating sketches of Americans who have unjustly been relegated to the footnotes of history. While not all of the authors’ subjects are truly obscure—most students of the Revolutionary period are aware of Polish patriot Tadeusz Kosciuszko or the Tory William Franklin, Benjamin’s son, who was the last royal governor of New Jersey, and of Peggy Shippen, who induced Benedict Arnold’s treason, while Tecumseh and Sitting Bull are well known even to casual students of American history. But most have faded from popular consciousness despite having been influential or even notorious in their own time. After vividly sketching the bloody tale of Tom Quick, who fought a personal feud with the Lenape Indians for 40 years, the authors tell the stories of Native Americans who resisted the conquest of the continent by whites, like the Lenape Teedyuscung, and those who conformed to white culture, like old-time Cleveland baseball star Louis Sockalexis, an Abenaki Indian after whom the Cleveland Indians were named. Besides Native Americans, the authors depict persons who, often courageously, resisted the exclusions of white male society: Anne Hutchinson, the independent mystic who dared defy the male authority of the Puritan church; James Forten, black Philadelphia inventor and philanthropist and his granddaughter Charlotte, an abolitionist who taught ex-slaves at a special school in South Carolina; and Myra Bradwell, feminist lawyer and suffragist. Charmingly, the authors also include an account of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison taking a summer vacation in New England in 1791; rather than showing us “forgotten Americans,” here the authors emphasize the forgotten dimensions of the best- remembered Americans. Well narrated, these thumbnail portraits vividly show the forgotten side of important struggles and issues in American history.
Pub Date: June 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-201-77314-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
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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