A thoughtful and fascinating account.
A well-crafted study of the treatment of the disabled in early American society.
At an international exhibition in London in 1851, writes Freeberg (Humanities/Colby-Sawyer Coll.), the American exhibit consisted of “a model of Niagara Falls, some false teeth, and a large collection of pasteboard eagles.” A disappointed American editor remarked that the nation should have sent Laura Bridgman there, for everyone in Europe had heard by then of this now-forgotten marvel of American culture. A deaf and blind farm girl from New Hampshire, Bridgman had been placed (at seven) in Boston’s Perkins Institution for the Blind. There, under the tutelage of Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, she had learned how to read, write, and even talk by means of a “manual alphabet.” Howe’s triumph in teaching these skills to Bridgman, writes Freeberg, had bearing not only on the treatment of the supposedly unimprovable handicapped, but also on contemporary philosophy and theology—for it demonstrated that nurture could overcome nature. Howe, a Unitarian, was also interested to learn whether religious inclinations were innate, reasoning that if Bridgman showed any spiritual sensibilities this would prove, against Calvinist doctrine, that humans were not “deeply alienated from God.” His widely published reports on his findings throughout the course of Bridgman’s education made her an international cause célèbre, and Charles Dickens himself made it a point to visit Bridgman while on his famed American tour. No one ever thought to ask Bridgman of her own views of her experiences, however, on the assumption that “she could never understand the issues involved and would only be shocked and confused to learn that so many people were scrutinizing her every word and deed”; although the omission seems paternalistic, the author points out that Bridgman, in fact, seems to have developed no ability to think deeply or abstractly—a matter that fueled still further debates. Still, Howe’s humane treatment afforded her at least some measure of happiness, and his ideas influenced the education of others with disabilities—notably, Helen Keller, whose teacher (Annie Sullivan) read all of Howe’s reports and interviewed Bridgman herself. (For a competing biography of the subject, see Elisabeth Gitter’s The Imprisoned Guest, below.)
A thoughtful and fascinating account.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-674-00589-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2001
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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