Jefferson was such an enigma that studies of him are almost as numerous as the volumes in the great man’s own library—but...
Historian Halliday votes to keep Thomas Jefferson on Mount Rushmore.
First, in scarcely a hundred pages, the author sketches a profile up close and personal of his intriguing subject, with little detail about the statesman’s public service. The rest of the text counts Jefferson’s friends and relatives and reconstructs his views on such diverse subjects as literature, sex, religion, politics, and race. The writing of the Declaration is noted briefly, with more attention given to the composition of the descriptive “Notes on Virginia” and the famous “Head and Heart” essay. Much space is devoted to the women in the life of the famous polymath, who learned a lot from the ladies. Foremost, naturally, is Sally Hemings, the slave with whom the Virginia gentleman maintained a long, vibrant love affair—along with several children. Sally, half-sister of his late wife, had accompanied Jefferson’s daughter to France when he was there as US envoy. Halliday argues that the affair was, all in all, respectable and quite satisfactory to both master and servant. (One can almost picture them at Monticello in old age, comforting themselves with the knowledge that “We’ll always have Paris.”) The author reviews the biographical work of several of his predecessors, particularly Dumas Malone, author of six reverent volumes. To Malone he gives the back of his authorial hand, detecting “a distinct aura of racial bias, whether conscious or unconscious.” On the other hand, the work of Fawn Brodie is deservedly praised.
Jefferson was such an enigma that studies of him are almost as numerous as the volumes in the great man’s own library—but this valuable new account deserves a prominent place among them. (Illustrated throughout)Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-06-019793-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 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
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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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