The prolific biographer of Conrad, Poe, and Hemingway (among others) doesn't have to compete with earlier books in this case, since his straightforward account beats to the marketplace even the authorized life—due at some indefinite future date from Wilson editor Lewis Dabney—of America's greatest man of letters. Meyers's real competition is Wilson (18951972) himself, whose sexually frank and socially candid journals, as well as his many memoirs and volumes of published letters, offer a formidably complete chronicle. To his credit, Meyers has studied these documents with a discerning eye and arranged the best parts into a coherent narrative. Particularly attentive to Wilson's vivid sex life, he notes the short and stocky belle-lettrist's belated sexual initiation (at age 25) and a list of lovers that reads like a Who's Who of modern literature, including Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elinor Wylie, Louise Bogan, Leonie Adams, and Mary McCarthy, who became his third wife. Meyers sheds new light on this tumultuous marriage, which got vitriolic treatment from McCarthy in several novels as well as in Intellectual Memoirs, though her lawyers insisted on suppressing Wilson's comments on it in the published edition of his diaries. Far from an ideal husband or father (he married four times and sired three children), Wilson was hardly the violent cad depicted by the ambitious and deluded McCarthy, Meyers concludes. The author covers Wilson's troubled financial history (including his fracas with the IRS) and surprising sales figures—his book on the Dead Sea Scrolls was his only best-seller, far exceeding the figures for such better-known volumes as Axel's Castle and Patriotic Gore. A bland critic, Meyers wisely skimps on literary analysis in favor of character judgments, which he makes with considerable shrewdness. A neat and fluent narrative that will satisfy Wilson fans as well as those who want an introduction to America's Samuel Johnson.
Pub Date: May 8, 1995
ISBN: 0-395-68993-7
Page Count: 576
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1995
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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