Of the two golden lads—the philosopher, essayist and barrister Francis Bacon, and his brother Anthony, sons of Elizabeth I's Lord Keeper—du Maurier is most concerned with the career of Anthony, whose life was anything but golden. Francis is more or less neglected, until the Earl of Essex's trial when he spoke for the Crown and against Essex who had been his generous patron. Perhaps, it is suggested, he did this to protect his brother Anthony, a courier for the Earl, corresponding furtively with James VI of Scotland and engaged in covert reconnaissance activities in France. Not surprisingly Anthony was under beady-eyed scrutiny by both Elizabeth and Cecil and he usually wriggled out of Court appearances by taking to his bed. Francis in the meantime, because of his opposition to the Crown's tax subsidy proposal, was continually denied advancement (his compliant performance at the Essex trial brought about a change in that royal policy). Anthony died in 1601, at forty-three, before Francis' major accomplishments; both men were unmarried. There are hints that Anthony might have had homosexual tendencies—he was arrested in France (falsely, the author believes) on a charge of sodomy. Du Maurier's research is extensive, if somewhat haphazardly splayed. Her speculations concerning the authorship of some of Essex's written pronouncements—and by extension even some of Shakespeare's lines—and attempts to trace the course of Anthony's clandestine spying activities abroad are in the nature of asides rather than stringent analyses. Meandering, and truth to tell, a shade dull, but worthwhile as an oblique approach to Francis Bacon's neglected brother and Elizabethan espionage at the slippery edge of power.
Pub Date: Oct. 24, 1975
ISBN: 1844080730
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1975
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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