A clear-eyed, sometimes-colorful account of a missionary’s life and times.
A biography of an early-20th-century American Presbyterian missionary in Pakistan.
Debut author McRight’s grandfather, Bible scholar and missionary Robert Maxwell (1871-1946), died just three days after her birth. She lays out his life story, drawing on family accounts and wider world events, and often quoting letters directly. Maxwell and his sister, Elizabeth, wrote to each other faithfully during the years that he lived in Pakistan, producing a large cache of correspondence, now held by Philadelphia’s Presbyterian Historical Society: “Reading Grandfather’s letters was a good reminder that…we cannot presume to change a culture or impose on its people our own assumptions about the way the world works,” the author writes. Maxwell, who was educated at the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University) and Allegheny Seminary, was respectful of Pakistan’s local culture; he learned Urdu to preach in the vernacular, simultaneously “devoting himself to education and evangelism” as the manager of Boys High School in Rawalpindi. His wife, Maud, taught at the girls’ school, and they eventually had four sons; two of them, George and Pollock, followed their father into ministry (as did the author, now retired). Maxwell later served on the executive committee of the Presbyterian synod’s New World Movement ecumenical missions program and surveyed schools and hospitals in Gujranwala. Over four decades, he pondered the Anglo and Christian influence in the Pakistan area and witnessed rising unrest, including Mohandas Gandhi’s 1930 march to protest the British salt tax. Overall, this is a touching tribute to an unassuming, dedicated man with a keen sense of purpose. The author sometimes inserts generic pages of political and social history to move the biography along. However, she re-creates some scenes in Maxwell’s life with real verve, such as one in which he encountered a cobra while bathing. At other points, McRight makes readers eyewitnesses to her grandfather’s birth and infuses good sensory details into a sequence outside his college boardinghouse. A few more scenes as vivid as these would have been welcome, although the family photographs, and especially the letters, do give readers a real sense of Maxwell’s personality.
A clear-eyed, sometimes-colorful account of a missionary’s life and times.Pub Date: Aug. 22, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-973632-54-2
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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