Papa’s best and worst on full display, sometimes in the same paragraph.
A Hemingway son and grandson present a reprinting of their ancestor’s 1935 work (Hemingway Library Edition) along with some illuminating supplementary material.
First-time readers of Green Hills will enjoy discovering the source of Hemingway’s famous praise for Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, as well as some images that appeared in subsequent fiction (“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber”). Hemingway originally created the volume as a sort of nonfiction novel, an actual account of his winter (1933-1934) African big-game hunting safari in company with his second wife, Pauline Pfeiffer, and others. Her diary, which Hemingway employed extensively, appears in an appendix and includes accounts of the author’s battles with dysentery (grim details) and of an accidental rifle discharge that just missed his head. Shooting himself in the head, of course, would come some 30 years later, and in Green Hills and its supplementary material are some comments about guns and suicide—by Hemingway and others—that crackle with dramatic irony. (In some observations he later deleted—and included here in an appendix—is his son's judgment that his father was a coward for shooting himself.) Also on display (in the text and in the supplements) are Papa’s famous ego, his waxing lyrical about beautiful animals he has just killed, and his testosterone-soaked rivalry with a hunting companion (Charles Thompson, called “Karl” in Green Hills), whose trophies always seemed to surpass Hemingway’s. Also in the appendices are lists of his kills (most were for meat, he says) and altered versions of his published text (most from the collection at the University of Virginia), one of which claims writer Archibald MacLeish was a coward. There is also some casual racism (one woman, he says in Green Hills, had “niggery legs”) and a delightful passage about a lioness attacking a wildebeest’s testicles.
Papa’s best and worst on full display, sometimes in the same paragraph.Pub Date: July 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4767-8755-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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