Of use and interest to students of southern letters and postwar American fiction.
A workmanlike biography of the noted southern writer.
Peter Taylor (1917–94), the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of A Summons to Memphis and other novels, collections of stories, and plays, was the scion of an aristocratic Tennessee family whose patriarch abandoned small-town life for the bright lights of Nashville. Privileged and well-educated, the adolescent Taylor fell in with Nashville’s intelligentsia, at the center of which was the poet and critic Allen Tate, who, Taylor recalled, “made literature and ideas seem more important than anything else in the world, and you wanted to put everything aside and follow him.” Taylor’s earliest published work showed the influence of Tate and other writers of the Southern Agrarian movement, but, as McAlexander (English/Univ. of Georgia) observes, he soon moved beyond the symbolic, ideological program of the Agrarians to “probe the issues of perception, communication, love, and freedom that would engage him throughout his career.” After uneventful military service in the closing months of WWII, Taylor entered graduate school at Kenyon College and struck up a long friendship with the poet Robert Lowell; he later taught at Kenyon, Indiana University, the University of Virginia, and other colleges and universities in the Midwest and South, all the while publishing short stories in the New Yorker and books that would be alternately damned as ersatz Faulkner and championed as the rising voice of the New South. Unlike the mercurial Lowell (or Faulkner, for that matter), Taylor lived an exemplary life. Married for 51 years, abstemious, and evidently happy, Taylor had only one quirk: a passion for buying and selling houses, which nicely supplemented his professorial salary and royalties. The outright normality of his life, however, translates into an absence of juicy anecdotes of the sort that make biographies of writers so entertaining. Lacking any real drama—save the occasional real-estate coup—McAlexander’s narrative is respectful and thorough. And not much fun to read.
Of use and interest to students of southern letters and postwar American fiction.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-8071-2706-X
Page Count: 325
Publisher: Louisiana State Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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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