This absorbing portrait of America's greatest poetic personality contains multitudes, all right. It opens onto a vast panorama of the United States in the 19th century, redefining the horizons of literary biography in the process. Reynolds (American Literature and American Studies/Graduate School of the City Univ. of New York; Beneath the American Renaissance, 1988) completes the project begun by Whitman, who sought to transform himself into the representative man of his America. In a manner that will intrigue as well as inform the general reader, Reynolds maps out historical settings from the Era of Good Feelings, which collapsed in the panic of 1819, the year of Whitman's birth, through to the Gilded Age, in which Whitman's life came to a close. A superb scholarly resource, this study also features a compelling narrative. Reynolds traces the roots of Whitman's appreciation for nature to his rural Long Island upbringing, while exploring his love for city life in Brooklyn and Manhattan. In fashioning a popular aesthetic that he hoped would unify his nation, Whitman adapted innovations from across the arts into a response to the political crises of the preCivil War era. Reynolds treats Whitman's legendarily multifarious sexuality at length, linking the poet's actions, thought, and works to the important controversies of his time over masturbation and free love. He shows how, in life as well as in art, Whitman contradicted himself: as an adept of various religious systems, as a champion of Lincoln and emancipation who all the same harbored deeply racist beliefs. Finally, Reynolds highlights Whitman as a literary celebrity who strategized to sell himself and his inner life for higher ends. On one level, it is disappointing that Reynolds seldom offers close readings that might underline the powerful effect of his works. On another level, however, the work of art on display here is Whitman himself, whose brilliance Reynolds illuminates fully. Perhaps then, this may be exemplary scholarship not just for our time, but for all times. (Book-of-the-Month Club/History Book Club/Quality Paperback Book Club selections)
Pub Date: April 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-394-58023-0
Page Count: 672
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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
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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