by Arthur Hoyle ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 4, 2014
Despite distracting tense changes, Hoyle offers generous interpretations of Miller’s oeuvre.
A refreshing biography of Henry Miller (1891–1980) that plunges into his work and spares readers some tedious early detail.
California-based educator and documentary filmmaker Hoyle catches up with Miller in 1939, when he was wrapping up his years of bohemian living in Paris, facing the prospect of German invasion and coming war. The social and moral collapses he witnessed about him are vividly captured in the work he produced during the 1930s, published by Jack Kahane through his Obelisk Press in Paris. These included Miller’s signature works celebrating the “artist of life,” such as Tropic of Cancer, published in 1934, which gave him notoriety in Europe but was banned in England and the United States for alleged obscenity until the early 1960s. Indeed, at this juncture, Miller was frustrated by the inability to publish his work in America. As impecunious as when he arrived in Paris, he was fatalistic about his future writing career: “I lack the courage for further hardships.” Moreover, his important love and benefactress, Anaïs Nin, was not going to leave her husband and make an idyllic life with Miller, and his interludes in Corfu and to New York meant an imminent break with her. Hoyle quotes extensively from Miller’s prodigious correspondence. Dismayed by the ugly acquisitiveness of New York, Miller nonetheless reconnected with his troubled family in Brooklyn, writing about this period as the reconciliation of the prodigal son. Moving to California, and being offered, in 1944, a cheap cabin to use in Big Sur, a region of startling natural beauty, radically altered Miller’s sense of his American identity and destiny as a writer. Here he would embark on his deeply autobiographical account of his upbringing, The Rosy Crucifixion, and forge important new relationships that would nourish his work and solidify his literary legacy as more than a “lowly pornographer.”
Despite distracting tense changes, Hoyle offers generous interpretations of Miller’s oeuvre.Pub Date: March 4, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61145-899-2
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: March 7, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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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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