Not by any means a new Doyle, but a familiar one supported by a wealth of new detail.
The life of Arthur Conan Doyle from the first biographer to be granted access to the Doyle archives.
The leading problem in writing about the creator of Sherlock Holmes is that Doyle always considered the detective stories that brought him fame and fortune inferior to his other writing, especially the historical novels and military histories by which he hoped to be remembered. Lycett (Dylan Thomas: A New Life, 2004, etc.) may not find a compelling balance between what Doyle thought was important about his life and work and what most readers will think important, but he does an excellent job rooting the Holmes stories in the financial and legal realities of their author’s life. A Study in Scarlet and The Sign of Four were among many projects the Edinburgh-trained physician planned to start his literary career. The first two series of Holmes short stories were written to order for a particular market; and after killing his tiresomely superior hero off in 1894, Doyle resurrected him only when it suited the requirements of a story he had already planned (The Hound of the Baskervilles) or as a means to some ready cash (the last three volumes of short stories). Lycett’s access to archival material sometimes threatens to overwhelm his portrait in minutiae, and his schematic portents (history, faith and family “were to battle for supremacy in Arthur’s personality”) are seldom persuasive. But his handling of newly available information on the uneasy triangle involving Doyle and his first and second wives; his checkered relationship with Harry Houdini, the debunker of spiritualism whom Doyle persistently and mistakenly claimed as an ally; and the tangled web of copyright lawsuits of film adaptations of Sherlock Holmes are all welcome.
Not by any means a new Doyle, but a familiar one supported by a wealth of new detail.Pub Date: Dec. 4, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-7432-7523-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 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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