A readable treatment of a scholarly subject.
A short critique of the letters between the famous James brothers provides an engaging footnote on the relationship and occasional rivalry between two of the finest minds of modern times.
Since academic writing is so often impenetrable, and since philosopher William admitted to being “baffled” by his novelist brother’s writing, one might fear that a study of the siblings from a university press might prove tough sledding. However, this analysis by Hallman (In Utopia, 2010) has a conversational tone that avoids cant. There’s an intimacy here as the brothers criticize each other’s work, engage in gossip and discuss their bowel problems: “Special, and playful attention was reserved for all manner of digestive failure,” as “Henry’s bowels were a perfect training ground for practicing elegant prose that described inelegant events.” Though William was barely a year older than Henry, his “letters often strike a parental tone” toward his younger brother, who “expressed disappointment that their mutual influence did not result in mutual appreciation.” Part of the tension was likely the differing arcs of their careers and influence; while William “inched his way into an academic career, he had watched as his younger brother jetted straight into the heart of the world’s literary elite.” Rather than resolving mysteries such as the sexuality of lifelong bachelor Henry, who “had better relationships with women in his fiction than in real life,” Hallman resists the conclusions to which others have jumped, while also showing that the relationship between the two brothers was closer, and their work more intertwined, than some have suggested. “I believe there exists no other epistolary commingling of minds as complete between figures that have each proven so influential,” writes Hallman.
A readable treatment of a scholarly subject.Pub Date: March 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-60938-151-6
Page Count: 156
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: Dec. 31, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2013
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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