Just in time for the film version of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, to be released in...
An amiable, uncluttered biography by Jacobs (Literature/Wheaton Coll.) that provides a key to Lewis’s Christian hierarchy of Narnia.
Jacobs’s life of Oxford don, poet, Christian apologist and children’s author Lewis is not as richly detailed as A.N. Wilson’s recent biography (C.S. Lewis, 2004), but Jacobs has the advantage of close access to the Marion Wade Center at Wheaton College, where the Lewis archives are housed. The author breezes through Lewis’s gloomy, dutiful childhood in Belfast, and later in England, as he endured the early death of his mother, the eccentricities of his father and the usual miseries of public school; to occupy themselves, he and his older brother, Warnie, created imaginary worlds full of talking animals that prefigure the universe of Narnia. Never a great fan of children, Lewis, who died in 1963, preferred the company of men, and as a fellow of Magdalen, Oxford, teaching medieval literature, he fell in with the famously strange crowd of Inklings, of whom JRR Tolkien was a member: “They formed a society in which formerly lonely and isolated men discovered that it wasn’t necessarily so crazy, after all, to believe in God and miracles.” About his 30-year relationship with Janie Moore, 25 years his senior, Jacobs is rather indulgent and forgiving, acknowledging the emotional stability a mother substitute lent his life. Jacobs continually returns to the extravagant vision of Narnia, and aims to fit the events of Lewis’s life as neatly as possible into its structure. In a final chapter, he addresses some of Narnia’s troublesome racist and sexist depictions.
Just in time for the film version of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, to be released in December.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-076690-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2005
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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