An impressively researched but tonally and structurally uneven work that loses its fascinating subject in the details.
An account of a 17th-century American woman who was charged with witchcraft.
Even history buffs may have missed the curious tale of Unise Cole, an early American settler who was repeatedly accused of being a witch during her years in Hampton, New Hampshire, in the 1600s. Cole was publicly whipped, set in stocks, and put on trial twice in her lifetime, but ultimately never executed for her supposed crimes. She remained such a local legend over the years that the town publicly exonerated her on its 300th anniversary in 1938. To date, she’s been the subject of radio dramas, poems, and even a 2013 album by the rock band Telergy, featuring Twisted Sister’s singer/songwriter Dee Snider. It’s the kind of story that writes itself, but despite a thorough amount of research, Lassiter (The Mark of Goody Cole, 2014, etc.) stumbles in the execution. An author’s note alerts readers that this is a work of “creative nonfiction,” meaning that she’s expanded or imagined scenes where the historical record fails. It’s an interesting, potentially perfect approach to this bizarre story, except that it lends the book a jarring tone; it shifts at breakneck speed from clinical reporting of the historical record to flowery, overly descriptive scenes of Goody Cole and her suspicious neighbors. This choice also results in occasional, weirdly archaic asides (such as a description of one person as “feeling stronger in spirit but still as weak as a day-old shoat”). There’s even inexplicable editorializing, as when Lassiter offers “condolences” to William Cole, Unise’s husband, for staying married to his troublesome wife for three decades. More problematic is the book’s overall structure and organization. To give readers a complete understanding of Cole’s world, Lassiter provides exhaustive, impressively sourced records of each neighbor and town tragedy, and each instance of persecution of local Quakers and clashes with Native Americans. But this account frequently loses sight of Unise herself, and only flimsily connects her life story to wider themes of paranoia and hysteria in the Puritan community. Although early America enthusiasts will jump at the chance to read more about pre-Salem witchcraft trials, this book doesn’t quite live up to the promise of its subject.
An impressively researched but tonally and structurally uneven work that loses its fascinating subject in the details.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5193-5730-4
Page Count: 248
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Feb. 29, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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