As Stott reveals in this engrossing history, lust, greed and the unquenchable thirst for fame were forces of evil that...
A literary history reveals the sorrows of the Romantics.
Central to Romanticism was the cult of personality, the “ideology of the creative genius and its attendant fascination with the lives of individuals.” Among the most fascinating was Lord George Gordon Byron, who, by 1816, was the most famous poet in England, as much for the gossip he incited as for his sensuous poetry. As Stott (English/Univ. of Buffalo, SUNY; The Pantomime Life of Joseph Grimaldi, 2009) argues in this impressive group biography, Byron assiduously created himself as a celebrity by “generating rumors about his atheism and sexual appetites, and by appearing dressed as a monk or in flamboyant Albanian robes, hosting orgiastic parties in which wine was drunk from a carved skull.” Women swooned over him, no one more persistently than Claire Clairmont, stepsister of Mary Shelley, who began her pursuit when she was 16. Claire, Mary and her lover, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Byron’s sometime friend and personal physician John Polidori make up the tragic cast of characters entangled with, and wounded by, the self-serving Byron. Despite this book’s sensational title, Stott focuses not on the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein nor The Vampyre, a tale by Polidori that Byron stole and published under his own name; the literary monsters who emerge from this story of selfishness and manipulation are Byron and Shelley. Although Byron deigned to sleep with Clairmont, he rejected her when she became pregnant, then insisted on sole custody of their daughter, refusing to allow Claire to see her. Shelley’s abandoned wife, Harriet, killed herself at 21; Mary’s half sister Fanny killed herself, as well, “unsettled” by Mary and Percy’s elopement. Polidori, a victim of Byron’s scorn and his own failed aspirations, committed suicide at the age of 25.
As Stott reveals in this engrossing history, lust, greed and the unquenchable thirst for fame were forces of evil that imbued the age of Romanticism with grief.Pub Date: Sept. 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60598-614-2
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2014
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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