Informative and absorbing, but it’s not the whole story.
The complexities of emigration and cultural adaptation, as well as the corrosive effects of an embattled career, are precisely traced in Conrad scholar Stape’s rigorously compressed biography.
The various stages in the peripatetic life of Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (1857–1924) included his birth in Poland, upbringing there and in Russia, successful tenures as a world-traveling captain in the British Merchant Navy and residence in England, where he became a master of narrative art since renowned as one of the avatars of literary modernism. The strength of Stape’s meticulous chronicle is the clarity with which it illuminates this unhappy genius’s vanity, financial irresponsibility, hypochondria and enervating family life. (Wife Jessie was plagued by recurring grave health problems, and eldest son Borys was a profligate, weak-willed underachiever.) Stape writes convincingly of Conrad’s relationships with contemporary artists, celebrities and miscellaneous influential persons. Some, notably his encouraging editor Edward Garnett, were cherished friends; others, including novelists John Galsworthy and Conrad’s sometime collaborator Ford Madox Ford, were resources to be exploited. We learn a good deal about the provenance of such masterpieces as Lord Jim, Nostromo, Heart of Darkness and The Nigger of the “Narcissus.” But Stape’s decision to eschew analysis of these works misses opportunities to support his eloquent summary assertion that “Conrad speaks for an awareness of fragmentation so quintessentially modern that his voice…remains powerful and authoritative.” Indeed it does, but the real proof of Conrad’s importance resides in the complex structures and layered ambiguities of his portrayals of adventurers and exiles adrift in unfamiliar worlds—not in a sedulous accounting of their author’s often frantic efforts to keep his foundering career and reputation afloat.
Informative and absorbing, but it’s not the whole story.Pub Date: March 11, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4449-8
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2008
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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