Wheatley’s poetry comes into sharper focus, but Wheatley herself remains elusive.
A biography of the Phillis Wheatley focused on her poetry and the politics of Revolutionary-era America.
Waldstreicher, a history professor and author of Slavery’s Constitution and Runaway America, documents Wheatley’s arrival in Boston on the slave ship Phillis, her purchase by Susanna Wheatley in 1761, her storied writing career, and her life after emancipation. The author’s primary focus, however, is Wheatley’s work, about which he offers many intriguing insights. This book, he writes, is “a joint exercise in history and literary criticism.” Waldstreicher argues that Wheatley gave “subversive and productive meanings” to her classical and neoclassical-inspired poetry, becoming both a “political actor and an artist of quality and note” in the 18th-century world she inhabited, a world marked by the “abominable hypocrisy” of American slave owners who likened their oppression by Britain to slavery. For those familiar only with Wheatley’s often anthologized “On Being Brought From Africa to America,” the breadth and depth of her poetry will be a revelation, as will her correspondence with Samson Occom and George Washington; her intimate, lifelong friendship with Obour Tanner, an enslaved woman in Newport, Rhode Island; and the details of Wheatley’s trip with her enslaver’s son to London, where she stayed for six weeks in 1763. The attention that Waldstreicher pays to the complexity of Wheatley’s identities as an African, a woman, and an enslaved person (among other identities) in his close readings of her poetry is sometimes missing from his discussion of her life. Questions like how much control Wheatley had over her own literary productions and their circulation while she was enslaved remain largely unasked. Given his focus on the political contexts and meanings of Wheatley’s work, Waldstreicher leaves room for future biographers to further examine Wheatley’s life as she became the “most famous African in North America and Europe during the era of the American Revolution.”
Wheatley’s poetry comes into sharper focus, but Wheatley herself remains elusive.Pub Date: March 7, 2023
ISBN: 9780809098248
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2023
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.
The Harvard historian and Texas native demonstrates what the holiday means to her and to the rest of the nation.
Initially celebrated primarily by Black Texans, Juneteenth refers to June 19, 1865, when a Union general arrived in Galveston to proclaim the end of slavery with the defeat of the Confederacy. If only history were that simple. In her latest, Gordon-Reed, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, and numerous other honors, describes how Whites raged and committed violence against celebratory Blacks as racism in Texas and across the country continued to spread through segregation, Jim Crow laws, and separate-but-equal rationalizations. As Gordon-Reed amply shows in this smooth combination of memoir, essay, and history, such racism is by no means a thing of the past, even as Juneteenth has come to be celebrated by all of Texas and throughout the U.S. The Galveston announcement, notes the author, came well after the Emancipation Proclamation but before the ratification of the 13th Amendment. Though Gordon-Reed writes fondly of her native state, especially the strong familial ties and sense of community, she acknowledges her challenges as a woman of color in a state where “the image of Texas has a gender and a race: “Texas is a White man.” The author astutely explores “what that means for everyone who lives in Texas and is not a White man.” With all of its diversity and geographic expanse, Texas also has a singular history—as part of Mexico, as its own republic from 1836 to 1846, and as a place that “has connections to people of African descent that go back centuries.” All of this provides context for the uniqueness of this historical moment, which Gordon-Reed explores with her characteristic rigor and insight.
A concise personal and scholarly history that avoids academic jargon as it illuminates emotional truths.Pub Date: May 4, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-63149-883-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
The Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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