A solid introduction to an interesting life, but nothing definitive about a pivotal figure in American culture.
Readable, once-over-lightly biography of “America’s first bona fide best-selling author.”
The dreamy son of a Manhattan merchant, Washington Irving (1783–1859) desultorily studied law but devoted most of his early 20s to travels financed by his indulgent older brothers and to drinking and general rowdiness with a close-knit band of pals. Their boyish high spirits, committed to paper in 1807 in a periodical called Salmagundi, won Irving local fame for his easy wit; he cemented his reputation with the gently satirical A History of New York in 1809. The death of his fiancée and a floundering brother in Liverpool sent him in 1815 to Europe, where he remained for 17 years, prompting charges from jealous rival James Fenimore Cooper that he was too busy sucking up to the European aristocracy to be a real American writer. But Irving held on to his American fans with The Sketch Book (1819–20), which contained his two most famous stories, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and later published successful books about Columbus, the Alhambra and George Washington. He was economically secure and generally revered during his final years back home in America. He had helped the youthful United States see itself as a nation through the landscapes sketched in his graceful, lightweight essays and sketches. First-time author Jones, a former political speechwriter and current policy analyst, doesn’t provide much context to explain the writer’s importance to America’s fledgling literature, and he tries a bit too hard to bring Irving up-to-date: It’s not really necessary to know that land speculation was “the nineteenth-century equivalent of dot-com ventures,” nor are Jones’s occasional references to Irving’s “possible homosexuality” substantiated by anything except warm epistolary expressions of affection that were commonplace among male friends during that period. Still, his breezy approach suits his agreeable subject, who never took himself too seriously.
A solid introduction to an interesting life, but nothing definitive about a pivotal figure in American culture.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-55970-836-4
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
