A deeply researched, recondite, occasionally mind-scrambling maze of familial relations and historical detail.
A study of the devolution of America’s first dynasty as it reflected the nation’s increasingly democratic and unruly dynamic.
American history scholar Egerton (History/Le Moyne Coll.; Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America, 2016, etc.) delves deeply into the third, fourth, and fifth generations of the Adams, finding them more “cripple[ed]” than entitled by the legacy of the great Revolutionary hero and second president, John Adams, and even that of his illustrious son, John Quincy Adams, who served both as president and anti-slavery congressman. As the author discovered while wading through vast amounts of research material—the dense narrative, packed with layered family detail, will lose some readers—the problem was that the Adams “progeny grew up aware of the perfectionist standards demanded of them, but equally mindful of their failures to reach those goals.” Alcoholism plagued several of the promising youth—e.g., John Quincy’s two brothers, Charles and Thomas—as well as those of the next generation, including two of John Quincy’s sons—George and John II—who both died as young men. The one son of John Quincy to carry on valiantly into Victorian responsibility was Charles Francis (Sr.), who was elected to Congress yet never captured the presidency; he also served on the court of St. James in London during the Civil War. His sons were a motley assortment: Charles Francis Jr. enlisted on the Northern side of the war out of familial obligation, but he expressed dismaying racist views. John Quincy II was the first to abandon the Republican Party for the Democratic Party “because of his disaffection for Reconstruction reforms.” Henry, rather more versatile, served as his father’s secretary in London and became a notable journalist and historian. As for the women of the family, many were gifted, yet most were thwarted. Thankfully, Egerton provides a family tree, which readers will want to keep handy.
A deeply researched, recondite, occasionally mind-scrambling maze of familial relations and historical detail.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-465-09388-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 6, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
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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