With no pretensions to original scholarship, this is an enjoyable "retelling of an exciting story about a remarkable...
Malanowski (The Coup, 2007, etc.) revives the legend of an "immortal" Civil War hero, now nearly forgotten.
“Habits of study: irregular. General conduct: bad. Aptitude for Naval Service: not good. Not recommended for continuance at the Academy.” So wrote the superintendent of Annapolis about William Barker Cushing (1842-1874) upon expelling him from the academy a month before the outbreak of the Civil War. Eventually, Cushing talked his way back into the Navy with a rank of acting master's mate, and four years later, he was a 22-year-old lieutenant commander nationally famous for astonishing exploits in which he showed a fighting spirit, creativity and determination rare in any military service. The most noteworthy of these was taking on the massive Confederate ironclad Albemarle in an open-picket boat and sinking her by personally guiding a mine under her hull and detonating it while under constant small-arms fire, an achievement for which he was voted the Thanks of Congress. His daring leadership of amphibious commando raids has caused him to be viewed as a precursor to the Navy SEALs. The author recognizes, however, that Cushing's reckless impatience for bold action, often bordering on insubordination, made him both an outstanding warrior and a difficult officer to manage. Indeed, Malanowski engages in brief speculation that Cushing's heroism may have been genius but may also have been rooted in a personality disorder. This is popular history for general readers, served up in bite-sized chapters of just a few pages each. The author presents Cushing's life story in a casual style, enthusiastically describing his adventures unrestrained by a historian's professional reserve.
With no pretensions to original scholarship, this is an enjoyable "retelling of an exciting story about a remarkable individual whose name had begun to fade."Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-393-24089-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: July 15, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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