A focused biography that derives its excellent specificity from Disraeli’s writings.
A well-documented life of the Victorian statesman and novelist Benjamin Disraeli (1804-1881) devotes much attention to his strong sense of being a Jew and an outsider.
Reading this succinct life of Disraeli as a “transitional figure” between the old order and the modern is often troubling, as his own copious words in novels and polemics about race played right into the hands of the growing cadre of anti-Semites. As part of the publisher’s Jewish Lives series, Cesarani (Director, Holocaust Research Centre, Royal Holloway, Univ. of London; Major Farran's Hat: The Untold Story of the Struggle to Establish the Jewish State, 2009, etc.) examines the question, what kind of a Jew was Disraeli? Indeed, from early on, he was a perfunctory Jew of Sephardic roots who was baptized as an adolescent by his father, an enlightened man of letters who had grown disenchanted with Jewish law and rabbinical authority and from whom Disraeli gleaned his literary bent and cosmopolitanism. “He was infused with a contempt of traditional Judaism and taught to think of Christianity as its worthier successor,” writes the author. Playing the “Jewish trope” in his fictionalized portrayals—i.e., that Jews “gravitated to radical ideologies and subversive causes,” that their resilience in outliving persecution honed their intelligence and made them privy to “subterranean agencies,” and so on—made Disraeli a highly paradoxical figure as he began his move into the political realm and “respectability.” A Tory by default, although more reactionary, plagued by chronic debt, married to a non-Jew, and hugely ambitious, Disraeli rose to become head of his party and a favorite of Queen Victoria. The author continually reveals how difficult it is to situate his legacy—such as in negotiating the purchase of the Suez Canal and mediating the Turkish-Russian crisis of 1878—outside of the anti-Semitic vitriol aimed at him and often extracted from his own words.
A focused biography that derives its excellent specificity from Disraeli’s writings.Pub Date: April 26, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-300-13751-4
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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
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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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