Lively survey of American writers in Paris from the liberation in 1944 through 1960, ending with the invasion of the Beats. Sawyer-Lauáanno (The Invisible Spectator, 1989's fine bio of Paul Bowles) opens with a bang as war-journalist Ernest Hemingway liberates the Ritz bar, steals future wife Mary Welsh from Pfc. Irwin Shaw, fences with AndrÇ Malraux about their war adventures, insults William Saroyan, lit-chats with J.D. Salinger, visits Picasso. Janet Flanner of The New Yorker writes movingly of Paris's returning POWs, forced laborers, and survivors of the concentration camps, and of the sobs, speechless anger, profound shock, and horror of the Parisians. Gertrude Stein gets off her grand likes and dislikes, peppered with anti-Semitic remarks, and tells new arrival Richard Wright that ``it is obvious that you and I are the only two geniuses of this era.'' Wright's is a chosen exile and he soon finds himself rejected in America, lauded in Europe. He's followed by fellow exiles James Baldwin and Chester Himes, and Baldwin sets out to slay Wright and become the leading black American writer. Dirty-books publisher Maurice Dirodias's Olympia Press gives a solid berth to Alexander Trocchi, Terry Southern, J.P. Donleavy, and Vladimir Nabokov. George Plimpton (his dirty book is turned down by Girodias) starts up The Paris Review with Harold (Doc) Humes, Peter Matthiessen, William Styron, Southern, Robert Bly, and Evan S. Connell, among other contributors. Sawyer- Lauáanno calls the early history of The Paris Review ``in many ways the story of the Parisian expatriate literary community itself.'' Celebrated war-novelist James Jones is on hand, as are Harry Mathews, John Ashbery, and Susan Sontag, while Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs hole up in a stinking, scummy, hideously decaying hotel to edit Naked Lunch. Intelligently done. Lively capsule histories lend zest to each writer's empowering Paris years. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs- -not seen.)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-8021-1371-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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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