All in all, a fine addition to American literary scholarship.
Letters illuminating the lives of the great African-American poet and his forgotten literary champion.
Hughes had published only in a few newspapers and literary journals when, at a Harlem party in 1924, he met the flamboyant arts critic Van Vechten—who, though born into a well-heeled white Midwestern family, sometimes thought of himself as “colored” and in any event labored vigorously to publicize the African-American writers, artists, and musicians who participated in the Harlem Renaissance. He introduced Hughes’s work to Alfred Knopf, who brought out The Weary Blues in 1925; by way of returning the favor, Hughes gingerly defended Van Vechten’s novel Nigger Heaven (which made liberal use of a word forbidden to whites then as now). Their friendship blossomed, and Van Vechten continued to promote Hughes’s work—and to help Hughes in moments of financial crisis—even after Hughes became internationally famous and Van Vechten slid into obscurity. The letters, thoughtfully edited and annotated by Bernard (African-American Studies/Smith Coll.), are often unremarkable exchanges of cordiality and gossip between two men who obviously cared a great deal for one another; they are, however, highly useful as adjuncts to Hughes’s autobiography and other life studies, posted as they are from such far-flung places as Hollywood and Central Asia. Moreover, they abound in references to the work of contemporaries, such as Countee Cullen and Bessie Smith, so that the volume makes useful reading for students of African-American literature and culture generally. The collection brings recognition to Van Vechten’s many efforts to connect African-American artists to the New York establishment—efforts, Bernard notes, that have too long been overlooked.
All in all, a fine addition to American literary scholarship.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2001
ISBN: 0-679-45113-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2000
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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