Though the menu is familiar, lovers of the early Romantics will enjoy the meal.
A close and charitable look at the rise and fall of one of the most famous friendships in literary history.
Sisman, who left the publishing business to write literary history (Boswell’s Presumptuous Task, 2001), traverses a portion of a vast but well-explored terrain with his latest. Coleridge, Wordsworth—is there something to add to what already resides in the myriad volumes about these two men, their writings, their coevals, their times? Not a lot. Sisman does offer some new perspectives, but mostly this is a summary—a brisk, informed and generally disinterested one (he avoids partisanship)—of the relationship between two extraordinary men. Early in their friendship, Coleridge began to recognize his friend’s superior abilities as a poet, and for years he urged Wordsworth to devote himself to a lengthy masterwork, The Recluse, which Wordsworth could never complete. Sisman does a fine job of rehearsing the stories of the birth of Lyrical Ballads (and the complications of its revisions and subsequent editions), of the closeness between Wordsworth and his devoted sister, Dorothy, of Coleridge’s miserable marriage to Sara, of his passion for another Sara (Hutchinson), of his decline into self-doubt and drugs and ill health. Sisman also shows plainly the growing professional frustrations of Wordsworth, whose early volumes were savaged by critics and who responded with what even his friends characterized as arrogance. Great literary names walk these pages: Godwin, Lamb, Hazlitt, Southey, De Quincey. The final chapters—chronicling the misunderstandings, jealousies, resentments, silences—make for emotional reading. The maps and illustrations (unseen) should be helpful; one wishes, as well, for a chronology.
Though the menu is familiar, lovers of the early Romantics will enjoy the meal.Pub Date: Feb. 19, 2007
ISBN: 0-670-03822-9
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2006
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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