A fluid, much-needed biography of a remarkable man.
The life and times of America’s first professional architect.
Baker (Emerita, History/Goucher Coll.; Margaret Sanger: A Life of Passion, 2011, etc.) offers up another solid historical biography with this insightful portrait of the early republic’s greatest architect. The last biography of Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764-1820) was published more than 60 years ago, and, as the author notes, “little or nothing is remembered of his works.” Baker clearly portrays Latrobe as instrumental in shaping not only the republic’s buildings and physical landscape, but also “American habits and beliefs.” He apprenticed in London at one of the city’s most active architectural practices and was soon designing private homes for the wealthy. Unfortunately, Baker writes, there were also “disturbing signs of Latrobe’s inability to manage his financial affairs,” something that would plague him throughout his life. After he went bankrupt, he sought new opportunities in America’s fledging republic. He designed Virginia’s state penitentiary and the Bank of Philadelphia. In 1803, his friendship with Thomas Jefferson led the president to appoint him “surveyor of public buildings.” Primarily tasked with designing the then-under-construction U.S. Capitol, including the House of Representatives and Senate wings and the Supreme Court’s meeting room, he also designed the main gate of the Washington Navy Yard and the Washington Canal. Although he “abominated” slavery, slaves were used extensively in the construction of Latrobe’s works. Budgetary issues resulted in his termination. While in Pittsburgh, working with Robert Fulton on steamboats, he was called back to Washington to supervise repairs to a Capitol that had been burned by the British during the War of 1812. Again, he was fired over budgetary problems. His final years were spent designing Baltimore’s Basilica, a “technical marvel of the time,” and much-needed waterworks to help New Orleans fight its yellow fever epidemics. Latrobe’s designs, writes the author, “conveyed an inspirational message to his new countrymen about the worthiness of their great experiment.”
A fluid, much-needed biography of a remarkable man.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-19-069645-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 26, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2019
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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