Justly returns our attention to Adams—though liberal readers will prefer Mark Puls’s 2006 biography, which emphasizes his...
Neocon view of the least-known Founding Father, arguing that his religious beliefs fueled his revolutionary ardor and, in today’s more secular America, have denied him his due from historians.
By the time this tendentious biography ends, it’s evident—to the author, at least—that Samuel Adams (1722–1803) would gleefully have supported firearms in every living room, prayer in the public schools and the invasion of Iraq. New York Sun managing editor Stoll does not display his conservative cards plainly until the end, but it’s patent that this is no disinterested analysis. However, it does provide the basic information. Adams’s father sold beer malt and was also christened Samuel (hence the name of today’s popular brand of brew). Before hostilities erupted, Adams the younger was a fiery journalist writing under a variety of pen names who made invaluable contributions to the revolution. Indeed, he was there on its opening day: Hiding from the British in Lexington, Adams and John Hancock quite literally heard, but did not see, the shot heard ’round the world. Before and after independence, Adams devoted much of his life to public service, as a representative to both Continental Congresses, a state legislator, lieutenant governor and governor of Massachusetts, whose constitution he helped frame. He never held national office. Stoll quotes frequently from Adams’s journalism and correspondence, making certain that readers are aware of nearly everything he ever wrote that alluded to the Bible—he liked to compare America’s revolutionaries with the biblical Israelites—or revealed his belief that religion should be at the heart of American life. Adams’s last known letter was to Thomas Paine, chiding him for his work on the skeptical The Age of Reason.
Justly returns our attention to Adams—though liberal readers will prefer Mark Puls’s 2006 biography, which emphasizes his role as a rabble-rousing man of the common people.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-7432-9911-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
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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