An enjoyable, generously illustrated book that will stimulate readers to reconsider Gibran, his work, and his heritage.
Jean and Kahlil George Gibran chronicle the life of their famous relation in an updated—and greatly expanded—version of their 1974 book, Kahlil Gibran: His Life and World.
The authors’ subject, the Lebanese-American poet Kahlil Gibran (1883-1931), is unquestionably interesting, and this new edition of the book features plenty of new research and many more photographs—an important addition given that Gibran was also a visual artist. Gibran was a young boy when his father became involved in a political scandal in their home of Bsharri, Mount Lebanon. His mother took her children to Boston, where they lived in the Syrian section of town. Publisher and art photographer Fred Holland Day initially spotted Gibran’s talent for art, and he helped him learn English, sparking his interest in literature. By the age of 15, Gibran was creating illustrations for Day’s books and submitting to New York publishers. However, around the same time, he was sent back to Lebanon to study; his family feared he was too Americanized. The strong connections the authors have for their subject illustrate the deep ties of the Syrian people to their heritage. They are also excellent at explaining how the artist/writer lived a dual life: two languages, two careers, and both Arabic- and English-speaking colleagues. Gibran was lucky to find good mentors, including Day, fellow writer Josephine Peabody, and Mary Haskell, his patron. Haskell was his lifelong financial savior, but she also helped him translate his work into English while maintaining the feel of his thoughts. Gibran was always involved in groups of writers, Syrians, and politicians, and his strong feelings for his homeland were a vital part of his soul. Auguste Rodin called him the William Blake of the 20th century, and his influence is still felt today, most notably with the continued sales of The Prophet, which was published in 1923 and has never been out of print.
An enjoyable, generously illustrated book that will stimulate readers to reconsider Gibran, his work, and his heritage.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-56656-085-6
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Interlink
Review Posted Online: May 3, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2016
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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