A worthwhile glimpse into European colonialism and its literary chroniclers.
A sturdy biography of the Anglo-Kenyan novelist and essayist, the first such work devoted to her.
“Elspeth Huxley [1907–97] is best known for her writings on Africa,” writes English literary scholar Nicholls. “Yet as a young woman she was excessively impatient to get away from her parents’ farm there.” That impatience took Huxley (née Grant) to England, where she forged a long career as a writer of many kinds of prose, from radio scripts to lengthy memoirs. Only one of her books, The Flame Trees of Thika, published in 1959, was particularly well known in its time or is remembered today; Nicholls gives it, as well as Huxley’s other work, careful consideration, showing which parts accurately reflect Huxley’s childhood in Kenya and which are the products of pure invention. (“The book,” she concludes, “is a work of fiction, though many incidents are based on actual events.” Librarians and booksellers may thus want to reshelve it.) Huxley was intensely aware of her status as an overlooked writer, Nicholls remarks, though not particularly aggrieved by it. Some of her lack of fame she attributed to a dislike for the swirl of self-promotion (“I am a very bad public speaker and detest it, and hopeless on committees”), some to being dismissed by the literary establishment as a colonial, some to having spoken and written in qualified defense of white colonialism in Africa. Nicholls gives a good account of Huxley’s life and work, placing her in the milieu of the British East Africa of WWI and the England of WWII and beyond, charting Huxley’s course from ambitious youth to parsimonious, somewhat dotty old age. All the while, from decade to decade, as Nicholls capably documents, Huxley remained active and productive, championed by the likes of T.S. Eliot even as her readership dwindled and assignments came fewer.
A worthwhile glimpse into European colonialism and its literary chroniclers.Pub Date: July 30, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-30041-7
Page Count: 528
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
