A beautifully detailed biography, rendered with honesty, integrity and humor.
An engaging look at the life and writings of a complex and contradictory fellow.
Veteran biographer Harman (Fanny Burney, 2000, etc.) takes on the legendary Robert Louis Stevenson, benefiting from the knowledge gained while editing two collections of his work. As fantastic as his best-known tales are, she reveals, they still uphold the axiom of art imitating life. Taking her title from a phrase Stevenson used to describe the duality of his personality, Harman here draws parallels to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, portraying her subject as a manic, effeminate man, alternately driven (after Jekyll and Hyde came to Stevenson in a dream, he wrote the entire manuscript in just six weeks) and easily distracted (he left behind dozens of incomplete works). The sickly only child of a Scottish engineer, Stevenson wanted both to write and to be respected by his parents; it was a struggle from the start to fulfill those joint goals. His thorough and opinionated biographer spares him no criticism, at times blasting what she views as Stevenson’s incompetence in writing and in personal relationships, always emphasizing the irony of his double life. An academic with degrees in engineering and law, a socialite proud of his Scottish heritage, Stevenson spent the last years of his short life (1850–94) in self-imposed exile in the South Seas with very little intellectual stimulation—and he loved it. His writing turned from the romanticism of Treasure Island to political realism as he raged against German rule in Samoa, but his true passion became working the land. “Nothing is so interesting as weeding,” he wrote to a friend. Harman bolsters her arguments with many quotes taken from his letters. Stevenson, it turns out, was a strange case indeed.
A beautifully detailed biography, rendered with honesty, integrity and humor.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-620984-6
Page Count: 528
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2005
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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