Insightful analysis and lucid prose make this autumnal portrait a rewarding experience.
Event-filled but melancholy history of the 17 years following Jefferson’s departure from the presidency in 1809.
The 66-year-old retiree was an international icon who received a steady stream of visitors and mail, writes Crawford (Unwise Passions: A True Story of a Remarkable Woman and the First Great Scandal of Eighteenth-Century America, 2000, etc.). His visitors eagerly set down their experiences, and Jefferson was an indefatigable letter-writer, so scholars have access to a mountain of material, capped by the legendary correspondence with John Adams. Money rarely left Jefferson’s thoughts during his final years. Presidential pensions did not exist, and he was juggling huge loans. He expected to live off his 10,000 acres and 200 slaves, a characteristically unrealistic financial plan—much of the book is taken up by accounts of his ineffectual efforts to better his fortune. Crawford’s chronicle of the founding of the University of Virginia, which Jefferson considered his greatest achievement next to the Declaration of Independence, details the president’s difficulties with the state legislature: True Jeffersonians, the lawmakers didn’t want to spend the money. A dedicated acolyte of the Enlightenment, Jefferson disliked the increasingly urban, populist and religious America of his retirement years. He also disliked the uneducated, pugnacious politicians (such as Andrew Jackson) preferred by new states west of the Appalachians. This distaste belied his credentials as a fervent, egalitarian democrat, but Jefferson was a man of disturbing contradictions. Historians love to quote his eloquent youthful denunciations of slavery, but Crawford reminds us that in retirement, immune from political damage, he refused to speak out and counseled correspondents against action. During the first great political debate on slavery in 1820, he unconditionally supported the Southern position. Detailed explanations of the Negro’s inferiority from a man who prided himself on his scientific acumen make sad reading, as does the steady decay of Jefferson’s personal and financial fortunes. Nonetheless, nearly all of his thoughts and actions merit attention.
Insightful analysis and lucid prose make this autumnal portrait a rewarding experience.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6079-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2007
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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