The first critical study in 75 years of the founder of Anglo-American Texas—an appealing figure who here has gained a shrewd and skilled biographer. Stephen Austin was born in the trans-Mississippi West and schooled in Connecticut, but he has forever been associated with the territory, then a part of Mexico, to which, in 1821, he led the first organized group of American colonists. Fifteen years later, Texas became an independent nation. As Cantrell (Hardin-Simmons Univ.) makes clear in this nuanced work, there could scarcely have been a more apt leader for so devilishly difficult a project. Austin mastered both the language and politics of independent Mexico and might have kept Texas part of that nation but for its leaders’ ineptitude. Respecting to the limits of his considerable powers of understanding the ways of northern Spanish America, he tried, as Cantrell makes amply evident, to steer his growing colony loyally within the Mexican empire. But gradually Austin came to believe—to the point of being jailed briefly for treason—that independence was essential if his fellow colonists were to flourish and succeed. Yet despite his indispensable leadership, when independence came, his fellow colonists turned instead to San Houston to be the republic’s first president. But Austin has remained in popular estimation ever since the “patriarch” of the Lone Star State, and Cantrell firmly keeps him there. This readable, always compelling, learned biography takes us deep into Mexican history and throws much light on the 19th-century American southwest. But most important, it also brings alive this complex, honorable, politically savvy loner who, haltered to the values and aspirations of his overbearing father, transformed parental expectations into a historically enduring project. A solid achievement of biographical art and modern western history that substitutes new evidence and current scholarship where myth and romance have long held sway.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-300-07683-5
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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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