A splendidly written story of injustice and male chauvinism, guaranteed to bring the blood to a full-rolling boil. (16 pages...
The unsavory details of a plagiarism case brought against H.G. Wells in the 1920s by a Toronto woman, arguing that, although several courts dismissed the suit, history should not.
Canadian historian McKillop first learned of Florence Deeks’s suit against Wells in a stray footnote, grew curious, began to explore, found Deeks’s papers at the Toronto Reference Library, and began the scholarly adventure of a lifetime. In 1914, Deeks began writing a world history that more fairly treated the contributions of women. For four years, she worked daily at the Toronto Public Library; at night she wrote her text, The Web of the World’s Romance. In July 1918, she delivered her typescript to Macmillan of Canada, who rejected and returned it in April 1919. Disappointed, she did not even open the package for many months. When she did, she was surprised to see its well-used condition; someone had read it very carefully. In the meantime, H.G. Wells, England’s popular novelist, had begun developing The Outline of History, a two-volume opus he somehow completed in less than a year. His publisher? Macmillan New York. The book was a bestseller; after Deeks spotted a glowing review, she immediately read it. She was horrified to discover pervasive similarities to her own manuscript in both structure and diction—Wells even repeated a number of her factual errors. She filed suit in Canada, lost; filed an appeal, lost; went to England for a hearing of the Privy Council, lost; appealed to George V, lost. McKillop artfully intercuts the stories of Deeks and Wells (his prolific writing and serial sexual encounters contend for attention here) and presents compelling evidence that Wells must have consulted her book as he quickly fashioned his own. But the old-boy legal and publishing establishments were not about to condemn one of their own. Case dismissed.
A splendidly written story of injustice and male chauvinism, guaranteed to bring the blood to a full-rolling boil. (16 pages b&w photographs)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-56858-236-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
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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