Another tame biographer lamely follows the call of Jack London's wild life. Kershaw, like many London biographers, suffers from an anxiety of reference, which started with the subject himself. London's bestselling versions of his life established him as not merely the California-bred, Klondike-hardened creator of the classic boys' adventure stories White Fang and The Call of the Wild, but also a celebrity—adventurer, drinker, sailor, war correspondent, socialist, revolutionary, though never wholly any of these. A self-educated literary Ragged Dick, London found his authorial calling after enduring miserable poverty, factory jobs, and rough living as a wharf rat, oyster-bed raider, and seal hunter. Rising mainly by obsessive determination, he would churn out reams of short stories, muck-raking articles, socialist tracts, and general ephemera before his death in 1924 at age 40. Adding to this voluminous output, his second wife, Charmian, would devote two volumes to him, The Book of Jack London, and his elder daughter by his failed first marriage, Joan, tried to work out their difficult relationship in Jack London and His Daughters, as well as a full-scale biography. Without making any contribution of his own, Kershaw, a contributing editor to GQ, patches together his work from these sources, as well as the two main London biographies, Irving Stone's romantic Sailor on Horseback (1938) and Richard O'Connor's stolid Jack London: A Biography (1964). The result mixes novelistic scenes and reconstructed dialogue with half-digested research and Cliff Notes summaries of London's works. Nowhere is there any real analysis of his contradictory character—the passionate socialist would take yellow journalism assignments from Hearst, his socialism was overshadowed by his social Darwinism—nor any significant attempt, aside from local color, to place him in the context of his wild times. In trying to track down the real Jack London, Kershaw retraces everyone else's footsteps. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen; maps)
Pub Date: Jan. 30, 1998
ISBN: 0-312-18119-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1997
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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