An extended hymn of self-praise from a noted writer of popular history. Octogenarian Flexner (An American Saga, 1983), who is best-known for his four-volume biography of George Washington, is without argument an author of many accomplishments. Regrettably, he uses this autobiography to argue just to this point, and he takes a querulous tone from the outset. Recalling that as an infant he fell out of his crib headfirst to the floor and was pronounced none the worse for the spill by the family doctor, Flexner cannot resist calling it ``a verdict which would have been denounced by the pedants and particularly the establishment of academic art historians with whom I was to feud in later years.'' Those feuds come thick and furious, with scholars, publishers, booksellers, and family; on the basis of his endless combat with those who will not see his light, Flexner pronounces himself a ``maverick,'' a brave individualist who will ride with no herd. This maverick, however, demands constant validation from the reader as he enumerates, one by one, his many successes, underscored by lengthy quotations from favorable reviews of his books. The occasional failures, of course, are not his doing, and his favorite targets for criticism, along with academic historians, are the proofreaders and copyeditors and publishers who allow errors to creep into his work, and who otherwise fail to understand him. Flexner's notes on the art of biography, which should, he argues, be practiced with emotion and the literary craftsmanship of Charles Dickens are obscured by his overweening pride. This is unfortunate, for Flexner should have had much to say on the hard work of ferreting out historical facts and shaping them into stories that will interest readers today, work for which he clearly has much talent. As it is, this overlong memoir will be of interest to Flexner's admirers alone.
Pub Date: Feb. 22, 1996
ISBN: 0-8232-1660-8
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Fordham Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1995
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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