Hulbert, a New Republic editor, here writes uphill: Like many a woman writer, Jean Stafford was defined more by the male company she kept (her failed-writer father, husbands Robert Lowell and A.J. Liebling, friends like Allen Tate and Peter Taylor and Robert Giroux) than by her own not-large opus (three novels, a few books of stories—for which she won a belated Pulitzer more than a decade after the last was written). So Stafford may never even have had a chance to be more than a minor writer—and Hulbert apparently both does and doesn't want to treat her as one. Family inconstancy and inconsistency were the basis of Stafford's fiction (which Hulbert analyzes dissertation-ishly, never giving the tang of the prose much due). And life kept providing Stafford with every reason to flee (as she would ultimately do) into loneliness and eccentricity. Weeks after she took up with Robert Lowell, while he still was in college, he crashed the car they were driving in and caused her great and long- lived injuries (his response was to write a poem about it). That Stafford didn't ditch him right then is key to the life Hulbert records: an addiction to pain and disappointment, a social existence based on hospitals, alcohol, and disdain. Like the others of her New Critic/confessional-poet early circle (see Eileen Simpson's fine Poets in Their Youth, 1982), Stafford seemed to know ambition and suffering as the only antipodes of existence. She filled the emptiness between with posture, boozy misery, and aggressive self-pity, elements that make this biography, too, seem underwhelmed and underutilized. If Stafford herself couldn't quite make art's silk purse out of life's sow's ear, neither can Hulbert's not very compelling book.
Pub Date: May 5, 1992
ISBN: 0-394-55704-2
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1992
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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