The successes and sufferings of the Beers and Sassoons makes for interesting material (Rachel was poet Siegfried’s aunt),...
Portrait of two important late-19th-century English families and their connection to the newspaper industry.
Negev and Koren (Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath's Rival and Ted Hughes' Doomed Love, 2006, etc.) spend an inordinate amount of time detailing the religious ancestry and great wealth of Rachel Sassoon and her husband Frederick Beer, even though both rejected their Jewish heritage. Not until well into the narrative do the authors finally begin to chronicle how the owners of the Observer and the Sunday Times took active roles in their business. This period was a time of great social and political changes, completely altering the methods of reporting the news. The advent of the telegraph enabled instant news and regular columns from around the world. The socialite pair first became active in the running of their newspapers in the early 1890s, and Rachel maintained her role throughout her husband’s subsequent illness. Over a mere eight years, Rachel’s papers righteously reported women’s issues, the working poor, the Dreyfus Affair, the Boer War and the establishment of the Penny Post. Even as she attempted to maintain a neutral position, her liberal views shaped her newspapers and influenced government and the populace alike. After Frederick’s death in 1901, she ceased her involvement with the papers entirely. Even so, her influence on journalism and particularly women in journalism ensured her place in history, even though those tedious Victorian “gentlemen” generally ignored and dismissed her work.
The successes and sufferings of the Beers and Sassoons makes for interesting material (Rachel was poet Siegfried’s aunt), but the authors missed an important opportunity to concentrate more on Rachel’s success in running her newspapers.Pub Date: March 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-553-80743-1
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Bantam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 25, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2011
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
