An unvarnished, dutiful, rather dull life of the 19th-century “Hoosier Poet,” author of “Little Orphant Annie” and “When the Frost Is on the Punkin.” When Riley’s personal manager, Marcus Dickey, published an official two-volume biography shortly after his death, Riley’s popularity (and sales) as America’s most-read poet, celebrated for his folksy vernacular verse, eclipsed that of Longfellow, Whittier, and Whitman. Now, on the 150th anniversary of his birth, van Allen’s authoritative if humdrum biography must contend not only with the fame-obscured details of Riley’s life but with the precipitous decline in his literary reputation. Van Allen’s Riley supersedes earlier portraits of the poet as a boozing colloquial rhymester and an upstanding embodiment of midwestern virtues, but her more measured account is correspondingly less engaging. In the post-Civil War Midwest, Riley sowed a few wild oats as an itinerant sign-painter and medicine show assistant, but apart from his hoax in producing a posthumous Edgar Allan Poe poem, “Leonainie,” his is a fairly conventional success story. Although Riley’s lack of formal education goaded his poetic industry, his ambition for celebrity and money bound him to the successful formula of his top-selling The Old Swimmin’-Hole and ‘Leven more Poems and the down-home humorous vignettes he read on the lucrative lecture circuit. By 1894 he was a bigger draw on the stagebill than Mark Twain, though a few years earlier his persistent battle with the bottle had terminated another tour. Riley overcame that blot on his reputation, however, and lived to receive an honorary degree from Yale and to have his birthday celebrated as a public event. Historian Van Allen adroitly situates Riley in the contemporary social trends leading up to the industrialized Gilded Age, during which nostalgia for the simple agricultural frontier boosted his sentimental, sententious verse, but she cannot erase Ambrose Bierce’s verdict against his “dreary illiterature.” The life of a literary local hero—of mostly local interest. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-253-33591-4
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Indiana Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
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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