An aptly subtitled biography of the trailblazing political polemicist: This detailed account finds virtually no trace of a personal life. After his wife's death in childbirth in 1760, argues Keane (Politics/Polytechnic of Central London), Paine (17371809) reserved his primary passion for politics; his jobs as a corsetmaker and an exciseman in rigid, hierarchical England only sharpened his sense of economic and social injustice. The American colonies, seething on the brink of revolt when he arrived in 1774, were ripe for ``someone who supposed, with immense seriousness, that in politics words count.'' Common Sense, his blast against British rule in particular and monarchy in general, was deliberately written in plain language accessible to those previously excluded from political discourse; it outsold any other pamphlet ever published in the colonies and shaped the course of the American Revolution. It was Paine's ability to speak to the common people, as much as what he said, that made authorities of every stripe nervous: He gradually lost favor in more conservative, post-revolutionary America; his return to England climaxed with the 1791 publication of The Rights of Man, a work so radically democratic he was charged with seditious libel and forced to flee the country; in revolutionary France, he narrowly escaped execution during the Reign of Terror when he proved as allergic to state despotism of the left as of the right. The Age of Reason, written during those dark days as an attempt to define his militantly nonsectarian religious beliefs, ensured that Paine was damned as an atheist when he went back to America; the poignant final chapters show him, sick and abandoned by all but a few friends, still churning out pamphlets to guide the nation that now scorned him. Nothing really new here (despite occasional sniping at minor errors by previous Paine biographers) but a solid, well-written portrait that reiterates Paine's ongoing importance in contemporary discussions of democracy's potential and perils.
Pub Date: March 6, 1995
ISBN: 0-316-48419-9
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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