Authoritative, accessible study of Osborn’s rare early work by an expert scholar of her writing and time.
A rigorous examination of the unsettling life and writing of a deeply pious woman in mid-18th-century America.
In looking closely at the life of this colonial evangelical woman and rare published author, Brekus (American Religious History/Univ. of Chicago; The Religious History of American Women, 2007, etc.) presents an illuminating window into early American religious sects and how deeply engrained they were in the everyday lives of all people. Osborn, born in 1714 to strict Congregationalist parents who settled in Newport, R.I., was one of the first women who published in America and was allowed to teach her Christian experience—a loaded Enlightenment word meaning what she came to know strictly firsthand. Having defied her parents at age 17 to run off with a sailor, widowed soon after with a baby and returning as the prodigal to her hometown, Osborn nearly joined the Anglicans before her mother guilt tripped her into returning to the fold. Then she had a born-again experience and resolved to write about it for the benefit of others. A deeply personal relationship with God and an urge to spread the gospel characterized the so-called revivalists emerging from the more strict reformist faiths that had seen the early founding of America. The evangelicals that Osborn gravitated toward at Rev. Nathaniel Clap’s First Church in Newport believed strongly in good works, human goodness and free will, although they were also extremely self-abasing. Her memoir was published, with the implicit approval of male church elders, as a way of preaching the Gospel, leading to popular prayer meetings at her home that included slaves. Brekus’ thorough work reveals by degrees how Osborn’s excruciatingly heartfelt faith was also responding to cataclysmic changes taking place in colonial life, ushering in what we now call capitalism, individualism and humanitarianism.
Authoritative, accessible study of Osborn’s rare early work by an expert scholar of her writing and time.Pub Date: Jan. 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-300-18290-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 24, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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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