Graceful, psychologically astute portrait of the enigmatic author/scholar/explorer who was one of the first Christians to enter Mecca, discovered Africa's Lake Tanganyika, and translated such masterpieces as the Kama Sutra and The Arabian Nights. Published in England last year to commemorate the centenary of Burton's death, this biography marks a decided advance over McLynn's plodding Stanley (1990). While McLynn organizes the known facts of Burton's life with admirable economy and clarity, it is when he speculates on his subject's quirky—and frequently self-defeating, proto-fascist, and woman-hating—reactions to his milieux that he achieves some of his most telling effects. For example, McLynn discusses Burton's repressed homosexuality and persuasively argues that, as a young officer in India, Burton actually took part in the sexual activities he described in his report on male brothels in Karachi. Equally convincing is McLynn's theory that Burton's lifelong misogyny stemmed from his failure as a heterosexual lover during his army career. Among other well-rounded portraits here are those of John Hanning Speke, Burton's fellow explorer who was eventually designated the discoverer of the sources of the Nile, and of Isabel Arundell, the neurotic woman whom Burton married and who destroyed many of his most important documents after his death. The Arundell portrait very nearly walks off with the book, in fact, as McLynn captures the conflicting facets of her character—fawning wife, relentless promoter of her husband's reputation, religious zealot, social snob—in highly evocative detail. Excepting McLynn's fondness for arcane words and foreign phrases (``foetor,'' ``feculent,'' and ``canaille'' all appear in a single sentence)—a compelling and satisfying depiction of a man and an era, a worthy companion to Edward Rice's best-selling Captain Sir Richard Francis Burton (1990). (Eight pages of b&w illustrations, four maps.)
Pub Date: July 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-7195-4818-7
Page Count: 448
Publisher: John Murray Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991
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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