A biography of Turner, whose famous thesis, ``The Significance of the Frontier in American History,'' is known to generations of American history students. Bogue, emeritus professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, offers a comprehensive study of Turner, who was born in 1862 in Wisconsin farm country and eventually came to influence countless students who were specializing in the then emergent fields of Western and sectional history. According to Bogue, Turner was a rare and innovative scholar, as well as a popular teacher who devoted many of his hours to eager acolytes and students, despite the demands of his own prodigious research. His protÇgÇs remembered him not only as a teacher, but as a companion in the process of discovering history. Turner believed that historians should always strive for broad objective truth even while they were necessarily subject to shaping by their own prejudicial experiences within a specific culture, era, and geography. Bogue argues that Turner, who formed and developed schools of Western history at Wisconsin and Harvard, is comparable only to the great Francis Parkman and Henry Adams as a major eminence in American historiography. Also noted here is the fact that Turner believed the growing concentration of control of natural resources and industry by the government made American political discontent inevitable, compromising and tampering with the celebrated tradition of American individualism that had long been especially characteristic of the West. Later, Turner's many family and social obligations, professional pressures, and poor health delayed the writing of his final ``big book.'' Bogue reveals that the historians who were his heirs believed that his frontier theory was overshadowed by other factors that were not given sufficient attention. Nevertheless, Turner's legacy lives on. A scholarly achievement, thick with details. (16 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8061-3039-3
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1998
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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