An illuminating portrait.
Parkman Prize–winner Richardson takes a vivid look at a pioneering American intellectual.
The biographer has previously tackled with aplomb such challenging thinkers as Thoreau (1995) and Emerson (1988), and here, too, the breadth and depth of his research is evident. William James (1842–1910) profoundly influenced modern philosophy and psychology, including the way these and other subjects are taught. His body of work and his life were so rich and colorful that distilling them to their essence is a daunting task. Richardson, however, strikes a careful balance between substantive fact and thoughtful commentary. He draws on James’s notebooks, diaries and published works, in addition to dozens of other sources, to accent his overview with carefully chosen quotations. This high degree of detail brings the romantic spirit of James to life in passages that convey his delight in a young woman who caught his eye, his exuberance upon first seeing the Amazon River, the humility he felt standing in the mountains at night surrounded by stars. The narrative is sometimes thrilling, sometimes arduous, much as James’s own life was slowed by illness and buoyed by love. A zealous reader from an early age, James attended Harvard Medical School as a prelude to his continuing career as a scholar. While in Cambridge, around 1871, he joined a small number of forward-thinking men who called themselves the Metaphysical Club. This group became the core of modern American intellectualism. Referring to “the sense of the amount of effort which we can put forth,” James wrote in Principles of Psychology, “He who can make none is but a shadow; he who can make much is a hero.” James accomplished much with his work, and the same can be said here of Richardson.
An illuminating portrait.Pub Date: Nov. 9, 2006
ISBN: 0-618-43325-2
Page Count: 640
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2006
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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