A graphic account of the man who, among other swashbuckling exploits, was the first to sail around the world and was largely responsible for saving England from invasion by the Spanish Armada. Born in Devon in 1542 of humble stock, Sir Francis Drake has long been one of England's archetypal heroes. Generations of British schoolchildren have heard of his bravery, his sense of humor, and his magnanimity toward captives, how he ``singed the King of Spain's beard'' by his daring raid on C†diz in 1587, and how, when informed that the Armada had been sighted off the coast of Plymouth, he continued his game of bowles with superb sangfroid. Cummins, a retired professor of Spanish (Univ. of Aberdeen, Scotland), tells us of the perils of the circumnavigation in the Golden Hind, the logistics of Spain's invasion plans, and Drake's many voyages and frequent plundering of Spanish gold. We also read of his less-known devout Protestantism and his claiming of California for England as Nova Albion in 1579. Cummins gives careful and detailed treatment to the controversial case of Thomas Doughty, who was tried and executed by Drake for insubordination during the voyage round the world. Our author brings an extensive knowledge of the English and Spanish literature to his narrative, and he often quotes original documents and eyewitness accounts. He concludes with a fascinating examination of the Drake legend in subsequent centuries, not least the invocation of his spirit in 1941, when Britain was again faced with mortal peril. Although Cummins does not omit Drake's faults, he is no revisionist: He repeats the traditional view, in which sacrilege, greed, slave trading, and piracy are manifestations of a heroic free spirit. A scholarly but basically laudatory picture, nicely timed for the fourth centenary of Drake's death next year.
Pub Date: Feb. 5, 1996
ISBN: 0-312-15811-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 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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