Despite a lack of evidence proving cause and effect, Egginton’s well-informed history of 16th-century Spanish life,...
A celebration of a beloved novel and its innovative author.
Commemorating the 400th anniversary of Cervantes’ death, Egginton (German and Romance Languages and Literature/Johns Hopkins Univ.; In Defense of Religious Moderation, 2011, etc.) makes a bold argument for the Spanish author’s importance: that in Don Quixote, he invented fiction, a genre distinct from history or poetry that creates the experience of “different worlds and perspectives” and generates emotions about characters “that feel real.” This novel, writes Egginton, was so new and influential that it changed the way readers viewed themselves and the world. Like Ilan Stavans’ recent Quixote (2015), Egginton asserts that the book was hugely popular in its own time and after, heralded by scores of major writers throughout the past four centuries—e.g., Goethe, Schiller, Flaubert, Faulkner, and Kundera. Thomas Jefferson used it to teach himself Spanish. Nevertheless, evidence that it has been read and praised does not prove how it transformed those readers and served as “the first sign of a truly modern consciousness.” Here, Egginton resorts to speculation, as he does in piecing together biographical details of Cervantes’ life. The book is filled with what the Spaniard “must have” felt or “could have” experienced. Troublesome also is the slippery term “modern.” Modern fiction, the author asserts, “allows for the reader’s identification and sympathies to shift between opposing viewpoints” and to get “a privileged view” into the consciousness and emotions of a character. According to Egginton, Cervantes taught readers “that we can play roles without believing in them” and demonstrated the difference “between what a person seems to be on the outside and what he or she feels or thinks on the inside.”
Despite a lack of evidence proving cause and effect, Egginton’s well-informed history of 16th-century Spanish life, politics, and culture makes for an engrossing read. He need not have insisted on sweeping claims for Cervantes’ mind-changing influence.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-62040-175-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Oct. 3, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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