by Fiona MacCarthy ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 26, 2002
Still, MacCarthy’s exhaustive catalogue of Byron’s every waking hour will be useful as source material for a future...
A densely detailed, lackluster life of the eminent poet, adventurer, and enfant terrible.
Think of Jim Morrison, or maybe Kurt Cobain, and you’ll have an idea of how George Gordon Byron (1788–1824) was perceived by the young people of his time. He had all the rock star turns, after all: he thrived on shocking society, wrote ardent lyrics, wore such outré duds as “a frogged greatcoat and ‘a curious foreign cap,’ ” figured prominently in gossip columns, traveled everywhere and in the worst of company, and died at the tender age of 35. Moreover, Byron wrestled with extraordinary demons: an absent father, an overweening and unhinged mother, a disfiguring handicap, an unreconciled and insatiable homosexuality, cycles of depression that sent him “veering between lassitude and hyperactivity, haunted by nightmare images and assailed by a sense of the uselessness of human endeavor.” Throughout a life packed with action and sometimes misbegotten enterprise, Byron managed to write such resonant poems as Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan, to inspire Mary Shelley to pen Frankenstein (on something of a dare), to advance the cause of Greek independence against the Turks, and to set an example for bad-boy artists henceforth. Byron’s life, it seems, was without a single dull moment, but MacCarthy (William Morris, 1995, etc.) fails to convey any of the excitement or undeniable glamour of his days. Instead, she worries rather excessively over his handicap, the cause of his death, and the sexual torments that he managed to work his way through by sleeping with everyone in sight. Neither does she seem to have much of an appreciation for his writing—the source, after all, of his renown—or for his achievements as a romantic revolutionary.
Still, MacCarthy’s exhaustive catalogue of Byron’s every waking hour will be useful as source material for a future biographer seeking to craft a more interpretive—and shorter, and more interesting—study.Pub Date: Nov. 26, 2002
ISBN: 0-374-18629-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2002
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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