A thoughtful, leisurely memoir by a noted journalist, editor, and writer. Born in 1915, Josephy (America in 1492, 1991, etc.) spent his childhood in a well-to-do household in which modern ideas bumped up against Gilded Age manners. Determined as a young man to be a writer, he tried his hand, with mixed success, at journalism, screenwriting, and short fiction. It did not hurt that his uncle was the noted publisher Alfred A. Knopf, that family friend H.L. Mencken encouraged him to write, or that he had many relatives who worked in Hollywood; even so, Josephy strove to advance on his own merits, refusing a medical deferment to enlist as a Marine combat correspondent in WWII and later working at a series of difficult and unrewarding jobs while learning his craft. In the 1950s he turned to editing and writing articles for American Heritage, a job which encouraged his long-standing interest in the history of the American West and afforded him many opportunities to explore a boyhood passion, Native American history. His early biographical study The Patriot Chiefs, he writes, was initially a commercial failure when published in 1961; shelved —among books on trees, butterflies, seashells, and other subjects of natural history— rather than among books of anthropology or politics, it found readers only in the later 1960s, when hippies (an audience Josephy apparently disdained) adopted Native Americans as exemplars of moral living. His research eventually took him to the high desert of eastern Oregon, where the New York—born and Harvard-educated Josephy bought a modest ranch and still spends part of the year. Admirers of Josephy’s work will enjoy these well-crafted reflections on history, writing, and the recent past.
Pub Date: Feb. 17, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40910-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
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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