The many longtime admirers of Thompson (Making History, 1994, etc.)—and any serious lovers of the past at its most vividly and subtly resuscitated—should slowly savor this last posthumous publication of his work. The somewhat misleadingly broad title must be a relic of the larger project on romantic literature on the threshold of the 19th century, of which this book was to be a part. Another part was published as the Blake study Witness Against the Beast in 1993. This volume comprises a miscellany of lectures, book reviews, and essays, collected by the author's widow, all of them loosely centered on the political vicissitudes of Wordsworth and Coleridge during the political and social upheavals of the 1790s, and their various relationships with lesser-known dissenting thinkers and agitators like William Godwin and John Thelwall. While readers unfamiliar with either the historical chronology or the poets' careers will have to piece together a makeshift picture of what's going on, it should be a pleasure to do so. Thompson draws on his obviously vast knowledge and legendary narrative brio to rescue a sense of the political, intellectual, and personal tensions in which the poets worked from the arid scholarship that would separate their poetry and politics, at the expense of both. The final long essay on Thelwall suggests the kind of dramatic synthesis a fully completed study would likely have achieved, using the life story of this rebellious poet and public speaker to plunge into the thick of radical politics in the 1790s—and to illustrate the journey of his sometime friends Wordsworth and Coleridge from revolution to disenchantment and ``apostasy,'' culminating with their role in Thelwall's eventual political and intellectual extinction. Thompson's work offers a perfect unity of history and literature, fulfilling the rich promise of his terse command for the historian's reading discipline—``these words in this context.''
Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1997
ISBN: 1-56584-360-6
Page Count: 218
Publisher: The New Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
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