Pyron (History/Florida International Univ.) offers a compelling portrait of the spirited, complex author of Gone With the Wind, a perceptive psychological analysis of the novel, and an examination of the work's changing critical fortunes as the South has become transformed during the past half century. Pyron takes a while to gain momentum as she details Mitchell's aristocratic Atlantan heritage, her forebears, and her early childhood. But once Mitchell takes the spotlight as a wild, beautiful, talented, and witty young woman, the reader is swept right along through the ensuing hundreds of pages. There emerges a fascinating portrait of a woman who contained, to paraphrase Walt Whitman, contradictory multitudes. She was repelled by sex but relished pornography. She was a gentleborn Atlanta deb, yet in her job for the Atlanta Journal she loved drinking the boys under the table and fearlessly entered the worst prisons and neighborhoods in the town. She was intensely private (Gone With the Wind was written in furiously guarded secrecy), and yet after the book's publication she answered every fan letter herself, a monumental outpouring of correspondence that prevented her from ever having the time or energy for fiction again. The Cinderella transformation of an obscure fledgling novelist into a superstar of a magnitude incredible even in this day of hype makes riveting reading. The scope of Pyron's book is enormous, ranging from the intimate- -Mitchell's deeply ambivalent relationship with her feminist mother that lay at the heart of Gone With the Wind—to the global—the intense responses to the book from people all over the world who saw in Mitchell's depiction of the throes of the Confederacy an image of their own struggles in WW II and its aftermath. Cyclonic—and it couldn't be more timely, with the publication of the sequel to Mitchell's classic just around the corner.
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-19-505276-5
Page Count: 560
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1991
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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