by Andrea Mays ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 12, 2015
A methodical opus comprising intensive memoir and inquisitive investigation.
An exacting inquiry into Shakespeare’s First Folio and the art of extreme book collecting, demonstrated by the life of a pathological bibliophile.
In her debut, lifelong Shakespeare enthusiast Mays (Economics/California State Univ., Long Beach) meticulously details the “curiously unexamined” life of millionaire businessman Henry Clay Folger (1857-1930), an obsessive, discriminating Bard collector who acquired an extremely rare, inaugural edition of dramatic works known as Shakespeare’s First Folio. He then went on to spend millions on other collectible tomes with the intent to amass as many Folio copies as possible and enact text comparisons with each—“to subject them to meticulous comparative analysis.” Mays begins with Shakespeare’s rise to prominence among London theater and literary circles. His death in 1616 left half of his oeuvre as yet unpublished until unauthorized attempts at collecting these works produced the much-pirated “Pavier Quarto” (False Folio), followed by a modest, laborious printing of the First Folio and subsequent editions thereafter. Mays describes this undertaking in vivid detail, and she confidently presents Folger as a driving force behind the eventual success of industrial giant Standard Oil, a position that would provide him with the wealth to pursue his obsessive passion. However, the impetus of Folger’s burgeoning interest in Shakespeare’s Folios remains a mystery even to Mays, whose scrupulous research is evident from her revealing closing notes and bibliography. Folger’s proliferating “Foliomania,” which endured throughout the early 1900s until his death, comprises the remainder of the book. Without becoming fiddly, the author assembles Folger’s “forgotten” lifetime through chapters brimming with biographical specifics (some known, some fascinatingly obscure) of his and wife’s substantial estate, and she honorably resurrects this affluent, rapacious eccentric who became wholly consumed with the acquisition of a priceless bonanza of Shakespeariana.
A methodical opus comprising intensive memoir and inquisitive investigation.Pub Date: May 12, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4391-1823-8
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: March 2, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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