An accessible biography that emphasizes the contradictions in Pushkin’s personality and how they contributed to his early death. In this bicentennial year of Pushkin’s birthe, the author establishes herself as a good synthesizer. While Feinstein’s (Lawrence and the Women: The Intimate Life of D.H. Lawrence, 1993) biography of Russia’s great literary figure is up-to-date on the latest research, it will serve as a readable and reliable English-language biography for the general public rather than a groundbreaking study for literary critics. Feinstein presents Pushkin’s life chronologically, from his birth and school days to his undoing in a dramatic duel and painful death. Chapters are concise and predictable. An introductory account of Russian imperial history falls into the trap of excessive shorthand, which leads to empty remarks such as the following about Peter the Great: he “unquestionably wanted to make Russia great.” From the start, Feinstein focuses on the juxtapositions within Pushkin’s personality and his various situations in life: his perception of himself as ugly and his pride in his African ancestry; his liberal political views and his unsolicited role as the tsar’s pet poet; his inheritance of his father’s love of gossip and society and his need for solitude for work; and his marriage to the beautiful young wife whose flirtations (if not infidelity) led to an eruption of Pushkin’s violent temper and the fatal duel that caused his death. For the general reader, Feinstein conveys some of the social complexity of Pushkin’s era and life at the royal court. She also makes a particular effort to make Pushkin’s works accessible and understandable in chapters that cover his most productive periods, offering excerpts to illustrate Pushkin’s creative genius. Feinstein’s Pushkin is a far more conventional biography than Serena Vitale’s recent Pushkin’s Button, with its marked imaginative flair and foundation of original research. But for the general reader with no knowledge of Russian, it offers a solid introduction to this literary giant. (8 b&w illustrations)
Pub Date: May 26, 1999
ISBN: 0-88001-674-4
Page Count: 309
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
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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