A skilled historian, Kukla has done his homework and written a detailed, lively, probably definitive biography of a...
A new biography of the American statesman who Thomas Jefferson said “was our leader in the measures of the Revolution in Virginia.”
Most Americans know little about Patrick Henry (1736-1799) aside from his proclamation during a speech: “Give me liberty, or give me death!” He deserves better, and historian Kukla (Mr. Jefferson’s Women, 2007, etc.) has written a compelling biography that serves his subject well. The son of a Virginia planter who became a lawyer, Henry proved a pugnacious advocate and superb speaker at a time when oratory was valued far more than it is today. Elected to the Virginia legislature in 1765, he arrived as it received the final text of the notorious Stamp Act. Almost immediately, Henry proposed resolutions asserting that Colonial legislatures, not Parliament, had exclusive right to tax the Colonies. These were more inflammatory than similar responses in other Colonies and widely admired, and the author considers them a major catalyst of the Revolution. Henry continued to attack Britain and served in the Continental Congress until 1776, when he became Virginia’s first post-Revolution governor, serving six one-year terms. He worked hard for the Revolution, but like most Americans (although not most of the elite) after 1783, he felt no need for a strong central government. Henry was not an intellectual like Adams, Jefferson, and Madison or a respected general like Washington. He was an agitator, similar to Samuel Adams. He played a central role in stirring up rebellion, a lesser role once the revolution began, and he did not help his reputation by leading Virginia’s opposition to ratifying the Constitution.
A skilled historian, Kukla has done his homework and written a detailed, lively, probably definitive biography of a revolutionary figure who merits more recognition but perhaps not promotion beyond the second tier of Founding Fathers.Pub Date: July 4, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4391-9081-4
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2017
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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