A biography that reluctantly digs the dirt—and there's an awful lot of it—on famed Kenyan-born aviatrix Beryl Markham, the first woman to fly the Atlantic and once the presumed author of the bestselling West with the Night. Long-time Kenya resident Trzebinski (The Kenya Pioneers, 1986; Silence will Speak, 1978), who knew Markham, draws on letters, diaries, and copious interviews to tell his subject's story. Throughout, we're reminded of Markham's difficult childhood: Abandoned by her wealthy English mother at age two, young Beryl was left to be raised by her father, his mistress, and the Africans on their farm. Markham received little formal education and even fewer notions of conventional piety and morality, but her father did teach her to ride and train horses, a skill that would provide her with a living throughout her life. But despite Trzebinski's patronizing plea that Markham's behavior was affected by her being more African than European, the aviatrix proved to be single-minded and often cruel in pursuit of what she wanted. She abandoned three husbands, one son, and numerous lovers (the Prince of Wales and his younger brother each became her lover while visiting Kenya); she betrayed friends like Karen Blixen, whose great love, Denys Finch Hatton, she seduced behind Blixen's back; and she never admitted that her third husband, Hollywood screenwriter Raoul Schumacher, wrote West with the Night. Trzebinski's evidence for all this is well documented and very persuasive—but to balance the heavy indictment, the author also emphasizes Markham's great courage, beauty, and charm. All the seamy settler shenanigans of life in Kenyan highlands are reprised in this gossipy, exhaustively researched Beryl Dearest. Another cult figure bites the dust. (Photos)
Pub Date: Aug. 30, 1993
ISBN: 0-393-03556-5
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1993
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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