by Hilary Spurling ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2003
A convincing and affecting corrective: an act of admiration, and love. (49 b&w illustrations)
A fond remembrance of an alluring young editor who married the dying author of Animal Farm and steadfastly administered his literary affairs thereafter, earning the enmity of some Orwell partisans.
Spurling (La Grand Thérèse, 2000, etc.) met Sonia Brownell (1918–80) in 1970 and was quickly taken with the mercurial, intelligent woman whose vagaries occasionally mystified even her friends and supporters. In her preface, Spurling declares her purpose: to restore Sonia’s reputation, to fracture “the myth of the cold and grasping Widow Orwell,” and to humanize someone the author believes has been unfairly maligned. Sonia was born to English parents in India. But her father died (a possible suicide) when she was only four months old, and so the mother returned to England and employed whatever means she could to protect and raise her two daughters. Sonia was bright—especially adept at languages—and went to Switzerland to study French in 1935. A horrible boating accident on Lake Geneva killed a friend; this episode, says Spurling, permanently affected Sonia. The author periodically composes paeans to Sonia’s beauty (sometimes excessively so), but there is no doubt that she magnetized men. (She apparently attracted an entire London school of artists near her flat.) Involved for years with Horizon magazine, Sonia was by most accounts a spectacular employee: assiduous, charming, creative, informed. (Some male writers, however, lost their fondness for her when they received her crisp, professional rejection notices.) Spurling reveals that Sonia is the model for the luscious Julia in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, the novel he finished shortly before he died of TB in 1950. Indeed, the dying novelist trusted Sonia so profoundly that he made her his sole heir. She protected his legacy sternly and co-edited the well-received four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (1968). She married badly another time but was the trusted friend of Ivy Compton-Burnett, Jean Rhys, Mary McCarthy, and many other luminaries.
A convincing and affecting corrective: an act of admiration, and love. (49 b&w illustrations)Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-58243-243-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2003
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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