by Anne Delbée & translated by Carol Cosman ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 19, 1992
From French author and producer DelbÇe, a fictionalized biography of current French feminist martyr Claudel, whose ill- starred life has also been the subject of a 1989 movie (Camille Claudel), as well as a play by DelbÇe. Reflecting its theatrical origins, the novel proceeds in a series of set pieces to tell the life of a talented woman doomed by a famous brother and even more famous lover. Born in 1864 to an ill-assorted couple, with a mother, provincial in habit and outlook, doing all she could to crush her daughter's spirit, Camille was determined from childhood to be a sculptor. Encouraged by her father, she took lessons and, when the family moved to Paris, was apprenticed to the much older Auguste Rodin, who—though immediately recognizing her tremendous talent—was equally ready to use it for his own ends, getting her to work on such pieces as the famed Burghers of Calais and Gates of Hell. Meanwhile, her younger brother, Paul, went on to become a famous poet. Camille soon became Rodin's lover, exhibited some of her own pieces, but found herself the subject of gossip and unkind speculation—her powerful and original work was thought to be really Rodin's. Rodin himself, unable to leave his loyal mistress, the aging Rose, was congenitally unfaithful, as well as overly demanding of Camille's assistance in his studio. He also seems to have stolen Camille's ideas, using one of her most cherished concepts for his famous statue of Balzac. Poor, unable to afford expensive sculpting supplies, and neglected by her increasingly famous brother, Camille began in 1906 a downward spiral into a madness that could confine her for 30 years to an asylum, where she died in 1943. A sorry tale of a wasted talent and life that deserves something better than this melodramatic, impressionistic account— an account long on effects and short on insight. (Includes 16 pp. of original photographs of Claudel's work and life.)
Pub Date: Oct. 19, 1992
ISBN: 1-56279-026-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1992
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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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