Finally, a superb and balanced biography of the enigmatic American religious leader. Independent historian Gill (with a doctorate from Cambridge; Agatha Christie: The Woman and Her Mysteries, not reviewed) spent years in legal negotiations with the Christian Science Church, trying to gain access to Mrs. Eddy’s voluminous correspondence. Her effort paid off: This is the best study to date of Eddy, surpassing other biographies which sought merely to debunk her as a charlatan and hysteric. Gill offers a scholar’s concern for placing Mrs. Eddy in the context of 19th-century American women’s history. She claims that Eddy has been misunderstood in part because she subverted the well-worn pattern of Victorian female life: —She was conventional in her twenties . . . [and] weak in her thirties, but indefatigably working in her sixties, famous in her seventies, [and] formidable in her eighties.— Excessively shrewd in her business dealings and distant from her only son, Mrs. Eddy embodied qualities usually assigned to Victorian men. And Gill’s portrait of her is hardly all sweetness and light. She discusses Mrs. Eddy’s almost cruel dealings with some of her closest disciples, her increasing paranoia as a superannuated recluse, and her tendencies to —borrow— (plagiarize) ideas from mentors like Phineas Quimby. Even so, Mrs. Eddy emerges from Gill’s warts-and-all treatment as a transcendent and powerful figure worthy of respect from the most ultra-orthodox Christian Scientist. If there’s any flaw here, it’s that Gill could have done more to explore19th-century religion. For example, she quotes from a letter in which the young Mary wrote of her adherence to a strict Grahamite diet. Gill never explains the origins or trendiness of Graham’s reforms, and assumes (probably wrongly) that the adolescent Mary was a borderline anorexic. In all, though, a genuine achievement.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-7382-0042-5
Page Count: 752
Publisher: Perseus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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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