by Cleanth Brooks & Allen Tate ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 1, 1998
An unremarkable correspondence between two remarkable southern men of letters at the forefronts of the New Critics and the Fugitive poets, respectively. Hopes for finding nascent critical insights and personal revelations quickly dim while reading over the shoulders of these two giants during four decades of friendship. As editor of the seminal Fugitive and a poet in the Agrarian movement, Tate had an established reputation when he first solicited an article from fellow Vanderbilt graduate Brooks, whose career had just begun to rise. Their early exchanges are only marginal to their assorted writings, however, and they switch mainly to topics of interest to mutual friends rather than posterity. Thus, one finds the ordinary dynamics of academic careers—who’s on top at Louisiana State University, which graduate protÇgÇ needs a lectureship, what permissions are cleared for which anthology—and the internecine relations of schools of poetry and criticism—John Crowe Ransom’s revisions, I.A. Richards’s scientific outlook on literature, the latest Modern Language Association feud. Tate and Brooks prove to be both impassioned partisans and seasoned campaigners. By the time Brooks settles down at Yale, where his and Robert “Red” Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry was adopted as a standard text, and Tate begins his collegiate wanderings, they have taken on Van Wyck Brooks, the LSU faculty, the MLA convention, and the whole Ivy League. “It’s my considered opinion,” Brooks wrote to Tate, “that in academic matters one ought never use the rapier when the meat-axe will do.” The juiciest description of a faculty brawl surprisingly turns out to an Albee-esque melÇe between Penn Warren’s fiery first wife and Brooks’s spouse. Near their correspondence’s end Brooks confesses, “Letters, I find—at least the letter that I have to dash off—are not an adequate substitute for real conversation.” Or, in this case, material for literary eavesdropping, either.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8262-1207-7
Page Count: 312
Publisher: Univ. of Missouri
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1998
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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