Disasters change people. Wilson counts the ways, often effectively and affectingly.
A biographer joins others writers swimming in the centennial vortex of the Titanic, which sank on Apr. 14, 1912.
Wilson (Harold Robbins: The Man Who Invented Sex, 2007, etc.) begins with the screams of the dying and ends with the sigh of the last survivor, Millvina Dean (just three months old on the night to remember), who died at 97 in 2009. In between he tells the stories of some of the 705 survivors—from the well known (like White Star Line managing director Bruce Ismay) to those unknown, except to Titanic scholars. Ismay’s controversial story, told more fully in Frances Wilson’s How to Survive the Titanic (2011), sits in the middle of the text, surrounded by those who, for the most part, survived in more conventional, socially acceptable ways: They were women, children, necessary crew members—or just plain lucky. Among the latter: teenager Jack Thayer, who leaped from the sinking vessel and somehow found a rescue craft, went on to write a memoir but took his own life in 1945. Wilson tells some other survivors’ stories in considerable detail, including that of Madeleine Force Astor, whose wealthy husband died that night; of some honeymooners; of Lady Duff Gordon, whose co-survivors in a virtually empty lifeboat declined the chance to pick up others in the icy water; of silent-film star Dorothy Gibson, featured in the first movie based on the disaster, Saved from the Titanic, which appeared just four weeks afterward. The author has kind words for Walter Lord, whose 1955 A Night to Remember started a second wave of interest. Wilson’s storytelling skills are up to the task, but his psychological ones sometimes send him off into the land of stretched analogies—as when he observes that Lady Duff’s stained kimono represents her stained character.
Disasters change people. Wilson counts the ways, often effectively and affectingly.Pub Date: March 6, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-7156-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 27, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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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