Portraits of various postWW II Paris-based writers capture the idiosyncratic personalities of literary notables but fail to cohere into a panorama. Campbell, who has written a biography of James Baldwin (Talking at the Gates, 1991), eagerly introduces his readers to a large group of American, French, and British authors. He opens with Richard Wright, expatriated just after the war, and his 1946 encounter with Gertrude Stein, then moves into a discussion of the important intellectual exchanges between Wright and Jean-Paul Sartre. Wright's presence drew Baldwin to Paris; the two soon had a falling out, however, which Campbell details sensitively. The author meanwhile develops another narrative, beginning with his fellow Scot Alexander Trocchi and the literary journal Merlin. Campbell describes the crucial role that Trocchi and his confederates played in the dissemination of Samuel Beckett's work and their eventual alliance with the notorious literary pornographer Maurice Girodias and his Olympia Press. (Beckett himself is only a shadowy presence here.) How does Campbell connect Wright, Baldwin, and their associates, on the one hand, with Trocchi, Girodias, and their publishing ventures on the other? The short answer is, he doesn't. Campbell explores the figure of the Negro delineated by African-American expatriates, as well as the derivative phenomenon of the ``white Negro''—making a strong case for French existentialist Boris Vian as its prototype, while also treating its celebration by the early Beats. He sketches the atmosphere of Cold War persecution and paranoia that gradually destroyed Wright and his cohorts, while also causing troubles for Olympia, with its porn-heavy list, but these parallels remain underdeveloped. Nevertheless, Campbell's effort has value as a series of miniatures that brings together such strangely similar contemporaneous artifacts as the novels of Chester Himes and The Story of O. Campbell is onto something—perhaps a third try with this material is in order.
Pub Date: Feb. 6, 1995
ISBN: 0-689-12172-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1994
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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