A challenging mix of American history and a unique biography that at times can wring the heart but that can’t escape the...
A stimulating intellectual biography of Laura Bridgman, a blind and deaf girl whose triumph over her own adversities made her as famous in the 1840s as Helen Keller was to be many years later.
Gitter (History/CUNY) excels at describing the fluid and dynamic intellectual currents of the Victorian era, especially in Boston (where Laura lived after her early childhood on a New Hampshire farm). The 1830s were the heyday of the New England Renaissance, which placed great stock in the doctrine of human perfectibility. The great humanitarian Samuel Gridley Howe tried to translate this belief into action at the Perkins Institution of the Blind, which he took charge of in 1832. He set about to show that the deaf and the blind could be educated and trained just like anyone else. Bridgman, who was born in 1829 and lost her sight and hearing at two, became the perfect test case for him. She arrived at Perkins in 1837, and the rest of her life—she died in 1889—was shaped by her association with Howe. Intelligent, with a quick and curious mind, Bridgman soon learned to read, write, and (using a manual alphabet) communicate. Realizing her value, Howe encouraged public displays of her abilities, and there were visits by such luminaries as Charles Dickens (who described her in his American Notes). Although Bridgman was said once to have been as famous as Queen Victoria, the public lost interest as she grew from a beautiful child into a gawky adult woman—and (though cared for at Perkins until her death) toward the end of her life she was described as solitary, lonely, and frustrated, sustained only by her deep religious feelings.
A challenging mix of American history and a unique biography that at times can wring the heart but that can’t escape the melancholy of its end. For another biography of Bridgman, see Ernest Freeberg’s The Education of Laura Bridgman, above.)Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-374-11738-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
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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