Though chiefly a book for scholars and English majors rather than general readers, there is much to glean from this brief...
A scholarly celebration of a “global Renaissance” in appreciation of Geoffrey Chaucer as the founding father of a great literary tradition.
In today's world, with English as a near universal language, it is instructive to regard Chaucer as a writer who tried to convince his readers (or listeners) that poetry and science could be explored through a developing, “hybrid tongue.” Wallace (English/Univ. of Pennsylvania; Strong Women: Life, Text, and Territory 1347-1645, 2011, etc.) demonstrates that Chaucer exercised complete freedom to ignore convention, as well as the pre-eminence of Italian and French, invigorating his storytelling through a language, Middle English, whose “paint had not yet dried.” Yet we learn that the well-traveled Chaucer, deeply influenced by Dante and Boccaccio, spoke several languages (Anglo-Norman especially), that he was more “European” than “English” in sensibility, and that his poetry “opens out to Europe, rather than withdraws from it.” Further, Chaucer, ever the experimentalist, let “genre and literary form run wild,” often taking a daring swipe at the prevailing social order. Interestingly, it was because Chaucer was an “adjunct” member of the royal household of Edward III that his life, unlike Shakespeare's, is so well-documented. Showing a solid command of history, Wallace provides fascinating analyses of Chaucer's personal and literary evolution. He is a master of his subject, insightful and provocative throughout. However, if this is an “introduction” to Chaucer, general readers may quake at the thought of a more demanding, advanced work. Wallace presupposes considerable reader familiarity with his academic discipline, not least with the argot of poetics. With endless comparisons to other writers, one can get lost in all the Chaucerian strategies and literary allusions.<
Though chiefly a book for scholars and English majors rather than general readers, there is much to glean from this brief but thorough exploration of a seminal, enduring poet whose influence is still felt today.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-880506-9
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Aug. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2017
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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