A somewhat improbable study that Means infuses with all the sympathy and interest he holds for his subject.
A lively biography of an elusive character who manages to sustain reader interest and teach us something about the early-19th-century American pull toward the West.
Journalist Means (The Avenger Takes His Place: Andrew Johnson and the 45 Days That Changed the Nation, 2006, etc.) finds the lack of hard evidence about the life of John Chapman (aka Johnny Appleseed) a liberating way to tell the story of early American migrations. Born in 1774 in Massachusetts, Chapman left home as a young man and headed steadily west, arming himself with apple seeds from cider presses and following waterways and Indian paths into virgin land that he would then clear and border with the seedlings. This constituted the marking of new settlements, and though Chapman speculated in land, he never stayed anywhere long enough to make a profit, but embraced a peripatetic, vegetarian life: “Chapman had the eye of a speculator, the heart of [a] philanthropist, the courage of a frontiersman, and the wandering instincts of a Bedouin nomad. His nature was almost self-canceling.” He was also a zealous evangelical, fond of sitting with an audience to spread the Gospel as shaped by Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg. Compulsively restless, Chapman kept moving, employing elaborate buying-leasing schemes and often paying in apple trees. Means estimates that during his life, Chapman (who died in 1845) purchased 1,200 acres of “often prime bottom land, plus an assortment of city, town, and village lots.” Why did he do it? Maybe it was to “find the exact seam between past and future, between encroaching civilization and resistant wilderness.” The author examines the making of the Appleseed myth—from the 1871 article by W.D. Haley in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine to Walt Disney’s 1948 cartoon classic Melody Time—as fodder for a country desperate for a model of, as Disney Story Department manager Hal Adelquist wrote, “brotherly love and unselfishness.”
A somewhat improbable study that Means infuses with all the sympathy and interest he holds for his subject.Pub Date: April 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-7825-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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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