Meticulously researched, but with limited audience appeal.
A detailed, yet sometimes-plodding study of the life and work of Georgette Heyer (1902–1974), the best-selling British Regency romance writer.
Kloester (Georgette Heyer’s Regency World, 2005) spent 10 years researching this book, which draws from "new and untapped archives of [Heyer's] letters,” as well as the author's notebooks and other private papers. The result is a carefully crafted, narrowly focused biography that concentrates on Heyer and her novels to the near exclusion of the times in which she was writing. The woman whom the Daily Telegraph called the "20th Century Jane Austen” was "born an Edwardian.” But Kloester points out that Heyer's upper-middle-class world and many of the traditions that informed it—“servants, horses and carriages, good manners, correct speech, the right clothing and a certain level of education and cultural literacy”—were products of the English Regency. Encouraged from an early age by her literature-loving father to read widely and write, Heyer produced her first novel when she was just 17. However, it would be more than 20 years before she would focus exclusively on the Regency romances for which she is best remembered. Until that time, she dabbled in historical, contemporary and detective fiction writing and experienced modest, but steadily increasing, success with each novel she published. After her father died in 1925, Heyer supported her mother and two brothers on her literary earnings. Until her husband could practice as an attorney, she had to support her own household as well, factors that Kloester believes contributed to her all-consuming drive to write. Heyer produced more than 50 novels in her lifetime, in addition to numerous short stories. Unable to see her work as being on par with "serious" writers, she would assert that her books sold because they were historical romances "that [didn't] date.” But as Kloester observes, the literary legacy Heyer could not fully own still "endures.”
Meticulously researched, but with limited audience appeal.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4022-7175-5
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Review Posted Online: Oct. 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2012
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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