by James McGrath Morris ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 9, 2010
A Horatio Alger tale shaded with Shakespearean darkness.
The spectacular rise of Joseph Pulitzer (1847–1911), from his humble origins as the son of a Jewish merchant in Hungary to his position as the most powerful journalist and publisher in the world.
Biographer’s Craft editor Morris (The Rose Man of Sing Sing, 2003) begins, uncharacteristically, with a kind of Biography 101 maneuver. In 1909, the virtually blind Pulitzer is aboard his luxurious yacht while a teeth-gnashing Theodore Roosevelt, enraged at Pulitzer’s continuous hostile coverage, has forced the Justice Department to convene grand juries to investigate his tormenter. Then the author swoops back to 1847 and makes readers wait 450 pages to find out what happened. Despite this organizational annoyance, Morris offers a substantial, balanced biography of a complicated, mesmerizing figure who embodied both the American Dream and the American Nightmare. After emigrating to the United States during the Civil War—he served with the Union cavalry but saw little action—Pulitzer struggled through penury and depression. However, his ferocious ambition to excel and prosper sent him to the Mercantile Library in St. Louis, where he studied and learned English and began his career as a reporter on a German-language newspaper. He brawled and worked his way into increasingly responsible positions, served a bit in public office and bought the struggling St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Itching for more exposure, Pulitzer moved to New York City, where he took over the struggling New York World and converted it into a powerhouse. He eventually used his millions to endow the Columbia School of Journalism, the Missouri School of Journalism and the eponymous prizes. Morris ably depicts a volatile, irascible, impulsive, unscrupulous man who betrayed and subverted his brother, verbally abused his wife and children, preached democracy, practiced autocracy and believed fervently that he was never wrong.
A Horatio Alger tale shaded with Shakespearean darkness.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-079869-7
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2009
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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