Throughout this animated and inspiring biography, Perry reminds us that the “battles Lorraine fought are still before us:...
An intimate portrait of the artist as a black woman at the crossroads.
Perry (African-American Studies/Princeton Univ.; May We Forever Stand: A History of the Black National Anthem, 2018, etc.) feels strongly that Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965) is an “important writer who has far too little written about her [and]…about her life.” This is a deeply personal book, less a biography than perhaps a “third person memoir” or “homage.” Perry infuses the narrative with a sense of urgency and enthusiasm because she believes Hansberry has something to teach us in these “complicated times.” Impressively, she tells her subject’s story in a tightly packed 256 pages. In her early years, Hansberry was radiant. The middle-class girl who grew up on Chicago’s South Side wasn’t the best student, but she had a “gift for leadership.” She displayed a sense of melancholy and loneliness as well as an insatiable intellectual yearning. After briefly attending the University of Wisconsin, she moved to New York, first to Greenwich Village and then Harlem, where she immersed herself in politics and 1950s activism with other intellectuals and artists. She married her partner in the radical left, Robert Nemiroff, in 1953. They divorced, amicably, in 1964, and Nemiroff would remain a friend, caretaker, and champion of her writings and legacy. Perry argues that we must deal head-on with Hansberry’s sexuality; it’s “unquestionable” that she was a lesbian, and the author discusses it in detail. Perry also smartly delves into the inspirations for Hansberry’s brilliant The Raisin in the Sun (kitchenette buildings, Gwendolyn Brooks, Langston Hughes) and engagingly explores Hansberry’s profound friendships with James Baldwin and Nina Simone. In her later years, Hansberry was an American radical; radicalism “was both a passion and a commitment. It was, in fact, a requirement for human decency.”
Throughout this animated and inspiring biography, Perry reminds us that the “battles Lorraine fought are still before us: exploitation of the poor, racism, neocolonialism, homophobia, and patriarchy.”Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-8070-6449-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.
The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.
Everyone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. These laws boil down to being as ruthless, selfish, manipulative, and deceitful as possible. Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. Each chapter is conveniently broken down into sections on what happened to those who transgressed or observed the particular law, the key elements in this law, and ways to defensively reverse this law when it’s used against you. Quotations in the margins amplify the lesson being taught. While compelling in the way an auto accident might be, the book is simply nonsense. Rules often contradict each other. We are told, for instance, to “be conspicuous at all cost,” then told to “behave like others.” More seriously, Greene never really defines “power,” and he merely asserts, rather than offers evidence for, the Hobbesian world of all against all in which he insists we live. The world may be like this at times, but often it isn’t. To ask why this is so would be a far more useful project.
If the authors are serious, this is a silly, distasteful book. If they are not, it’s a brilliant satire.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-670-88146-5
Page Count: 430
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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