In his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan referred to Joseph Warren as “a man who might have been one of the greatest...
A fresh biography of an underappreciated figure in American history.
John Trumbull immortalized Dr. Joseph Warren (1741-1775) in his painting The Death of General Warren at the Battle of Bunker’s Hill, which depicted the demise of the young physician and military officer. In his first book, Di Spigna, a speaker and volunteer at Colonial Williamsburg, reminds readers that Warren was more than a man who sacrificed his life for the cause of liberty. The son of a pious Massachusetts farmer, Warren attended Harvard, where the future revolutionary developed his oratorical skills when he was not committing pranks such as nailing his roommates’ shoes to the floor. His training as a physician coincided with the post–French and Indian War crisis between Britain and her American Colonies, and Warren would hold several positions in the Massachusetts resistance: head of the Boston Committee of Correspondence and North End Caucus, president of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress, and chairman of the Massachusetts Committee of Safety. He delivered two prominent orations on the Boston Massacre, wrote numerous articles and pamphlets, authored the Suffolk Resolves, sent Paul Revere on his famous ride, operated a spy ring, and participated in the battles of Lexington and Concord. In short, Di Spigna persuasively argues that Warren was “a rare combination of statesman and warrior” and that “his effective arsenal of voice, pen, and sword was unrivaled by any other patriot.” Yet the author does not neglect Warren’s medical career. He was one of the most prominent and respected physicians in Massachusetts, inoculating hundreds of people against smallpox without a single death. Warren was also a prominent Mason and devoted family man.
In his first inaugural address, Ronald Reagan referred to Joseph Warren as “a man who might have been one of the greatest among the founding fathers.” Hopefully, Di Spigna’s insightful biography will rekindle public interest in Warren, a man who deserves to be remembered for more than his death at Bunker Hill.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-553-41932-0
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
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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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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