For general readers, a useful refresher course on Vonnegut’s life and novels; scholars should look elsewhere.
An introductory-level summary of Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, with a biographical twist.
It’s clear that Sumner (History/Univ. of Detroit Mercy) is a devoted and thoughtful reader of Vonnegut’s novels. However, it’s difficult to tell whether his book is intended to be a scholarly work or simply the gushing evangelism of a true fan. Readers who enjoyed Slaughterhouse-Five but are looking for a refresher on the plot, or those coming to Vonnegut for the first time, will find that the book meets their needs. Readers seeking a more analytical approach may be disappointed. Sumner describes Vonnegut’s novels in chronological order and dispenses corresponding details from the author’s personal history when relevant. Though light on analysis, the book is accessible. In his chapter on Night Mother, Sumner zeroes in on the novel’s insistence on the impossibility of true moral purity through its portrayal of a protagonist who embodies the role of both war criminal and war hero: “He opens us to the disturbing malleability of the human soul, insists that there is no place of purity and ‘clean hands’ to which we can safely and finally retreat.” In the chapter on Cat’s Cradle, Sumner examines Vonnegut’s exploration of the occasionally evil consequences of good intentions. The chronological organization often reveals the development of a particular theme in successive novels, but it precludes a more in-depth investigation of these themes.
For general readers, a useful refresher course on Vonnegut’s life and novels; scholars should look elsewhere.Pub Date: Nov. 8, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-60980-349-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: Oct. 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2011
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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