A minor but solid, very well-written contribution to the vast literature surrounding Teddy Roosevelt.
A storied family is broken apart by its patriarch’s devotion to war and the quest for honor.
As Burns (1920: The Year that Made the Decade Roar, 2015, etc.) recounts, Quentin Roosevelt, born in 1897, was both Theodore Roosevelt’s youngest son and the repository of a great deal of his hopes. Sickly like his father, though less inclined to make boastful declarations such as that he was “as strong as a bull moose,” Quentin emerged in boyhood as a fine young man with a distinct sense of noblesse oblige. In one sparkling moment in the book, he quietly reproaches a haughty society dame who asks how he can stand the “common boys” at his school: “My father says there are only four kinds of boys: good boys and bad boys and tall boys and short boys; that’s all the kinds of boys there are.” With less drive than his father, who champed to get into the fight against Spain in Cuba and blustered his way into a “big stick” foreign policy in the White House, Quentin joined the fledgling aviation corps under Eddie Rickenbacker and died in France—an event, Burns writes, for which his mother, Edith, had been preparing ever since her war-loving husband went off to battle and then instilled in his children, one by one, an obligation to go to war. That resolve ended in a spiritual gloom, “a shroud he would wear for the rest of his days.” Roosevelt’s story is of a piece with his friend Rudyard Kipling’s, whose life and work were overturned by the loss of his son in France in 1915. None of it will come as news to readers well versed in the life of Roosevelt—it figures, for instance, in Edmund Morris’ Colonel Roosevelt (2010)—but Burns finds special meaning and resonance in the father-son relationship, and his slender book makes for a fine homage.
A minor but solid, very well-written contribution to the vast literature surrounding Teddy Roosevelt.Pub Date: Feb. 15, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-60598-951-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: Dec. 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2015
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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