By timing the posthumous release of his personal papers, Mencken (1880-1956) directs his biographers from his grave. But in Hobson (American Literature/Univ. of North Carolina, Serpent in Eden, etc.—not reviewed) he has met his nemesis—a conscientious and uncompromising scholar who has integrated the most recent and revisionary materials into a lucid, coherent, clearly definitive and respectful biography. Journalist, social critic, self-educated philologist (The American Language), an American Voltaire, an urban Mark Twain, a ``nay-saying Whitman,'' as Hobson calls him, Mencken was the official curmudgeon, the public voice for all the private prejudices and negativity of America through the 1920's. In essays, books, and articles, he expressed a fashionable contempt for religion, gentility, romantic love, women, Blacks, Jews, the South, indeed Americans themselves, a ``nation of misfits,'' an ``Eden of Clowns.'' The depth of these attitudes was revealed in the controversial My Life as Author and Editor (1993), in which he served as moralist and public avenger, identifying and dismissing some of the major writers of his age—his own close friends, Dreiser, Fitzgerald, and Wolfe, among others—for excessive drinking and womanizing. Mencken's own addiction was work, and writing was his ``incurable disease.'' He ended a long and fitful courtship because the woman became a Christian Scientist (a special problem to an atheist and hypochondriac), and at age 50, only after the death of his mother and sister, married an English teacher, having at best flirted with opera singer Gretchen Hood, film star Aileen Pringle, and writer Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes). Preferring the company of men, he believed that Freud had overrated sex, which was low among his priorities. His rage for order was expressed in a huge paper trail he left of his life—a strategy, Hobson says, for ``concealment and diversion.'' Even as he pursues Mencken's tracks, however, Hobson honors his privacy, respects his truths, and preserves his dignity.
Pub Date: April 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-394-56329-8
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1994
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
