An artful biography from Hatch (English/CCNY; Roots of African-American Drama, 1858-1940, etc.—not reviewed) that conveys the charm, complexity, pain, vision, and humanity of the amazing black gay actor, teacher, and writer Owen Dodson. Born in 1870, educated among the ambitious immigrant European population of N.Y.C., orphaned when he was 12, Dodson, a Bates College scholarship student, was—like many black intelligentsia of his generation—overeducated for the work that was available to him, but he found refuge in a series of academic posts teaching theater at such black colleges as Atlanta University (where he met W.E.B. DuBois), Lincoln, and, finally, Howard. There, his innovative production of Ibsen won the entire cast an invitation to Scandinavia. In plays (Sonata, The Poet's Caprice), a novel (Boy at the Window), and three volumes of poetry, he recorded the deprivations, exclusions, and insecurities that blacks of his generation suffered. He rejected dialect as ``plantation talk,'' as well as what he called the ``art of insult'' used by black writers like LeRoi Jones. Dodson's friendships—which transcended class, race, and political barriers—included alliances with W.H. Auden, Sir John Gielgud (who coached Dodson to do a black Hamlet), and Paul Robeson. His talent, charm, and idealism won patrons and supporters from Orson Welles—who offered to waive his fees for a black educational film—to the four-year-old who assured him that ``God made the world for you.'' But Dodson's sexual relationships were ill-fated and unhappy, and, in 1983, he died a lonely alcoholic, crippled by arthritis. Though perhaps unlucky in life, Dodson is lucky in his biographer—who values clarity, context, the revealing anecdote, and, above all, his subject's art. (Twenty-five photographs)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-252-01977-6
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Univ. of Illinois
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1993
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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