The surprisingly dreary product of 15 years of painstaking research, Sweeney's first book is a flat biography of the legendary Apache chief. Cochise was undoubtedly one of the greatest warrior chiefs in Native American history, fierce in battle and a capable leader, and, as Sweeney notes, no book-length biography of this dynamo exists—making the inadequacies of Sweeney's account all the more unfortunate. The son of a chief, Cochise grew to maturity in the then-Mexican-ruled Southwest during a period of relative tranquillity. Each breach of the peace brought a swift response, however, and rapid spirals of retaliation and revenge hampered any prospects of a lasting cease-fire. The increasing Anglo-American presence over the years, with its own territorial claims, gave the Apaches even more reason to fight to retain their way of life. A particularly misguided effort by the US Army in 1861 to recover a captive white boy by taking Apache hostages, Cochise and his brother among them, ended in bloodshed and executions on both sides, and Cochise's War was on in earnest. For nearly a decade, Cochise terrorized Americans and Mexicans in the region with assaults and ambushes, showing consummate skill as a strategist, until finally hounded into accepting a truce and reservation life in the early 1870's. He died soon after, an old man at peace, even though his struggle was taken up subsequently by Geronimo and others. Extensive notes and full use of sources readily indicate Sweeney's depth of research, but a frequent repetition of basic facts and lack of editorial judgment compromise any sense of scholarly achievement. History becomes a record of troop movements and body counts, creating the dullest of chronologies, while hazy conjecture about Cochise's undocumented activities proves a slippery supplement to more concrete information. Lackluster and grindingly detailed, albeit sympathetic toward its subject.
Pub Date: May 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-8061-2337-0
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Univ. of Oklahoma
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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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