Compelling tale with a gritty heroine: Broad’s hardscrabble adventures forcefully remind readers that 18th-century life bore...
Prolific biographer Erickson (Alexandra, 2001, etc.) skillfully renders the extraordinary life of Mary Broad, who survived a voyage to and from a penal colony to become James Boswell’s protégée.
Born in 1769 and raised in Cornwall, Mary grew up amid filth, violence, and privation in a period of especially hard times: harvests had failed, the fish were not running, the Cornish were starving. Arrested for robbery and sentenced to be hung, the 20-year-old girl was instead sent to the recently established penal colony of New South Wales in Australia, because the British government needed people, women in particular, to settle there. In the fetid prison hulks that dotted Plymouth harbor, imprisoned with prostitutes and habitual criminals, Mary became pregnant before she finally set sail. The 15,000-mile voyage was grueling: space, food, and water were limited, diseases rampant, and sexual abuse common. But Mary survived, giving birth to a daughter en route. When they reached Australia, she married fellow convict William Bryant in order that they could acquire their own land. But crops failed, famine was rife, the natives were hostile, and mortality was high; realizing that their lives were even worse than they’d been in England, the Bryants decided to escape. Bringing along Mary’s daughter and newborn son, they stole a boat and sailed with seven other adults up the east coast to Dutch-ruled Batavia, some 4,000 miles away. It was an epic feat, but Mary wasn’t yet safe. Discovered and sent back to England, with both her children dead, she was once more imprisoned. Luckily, her amazing story garnered public sympathy and the support of Boswell, who determined to secure her freedom.
Compelling tale with a gritty heroine: Broad’s hardscrabble adventures forcefully remind readers that 18th-century life bore very little resemblance to an episode of Masterpiece Theater.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-471-27140-3
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2004
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
