Novelist Markus (A Change of Luck, 1991, etc.), between her tendentious lionization of Elizabeth Barrett and bland veneration of Robert Browning, turns their complex union into a novelette romance for English majors. The unexpected marriage of the highly successful Barrett and the comparatively unknown Browning generated a perdurable literary legend, from the literary gossip columns of the day through Rudolph Besier's 1931 play, The Barretts of Wimpole Street (complete with tyrannical father and lovers' elopement), and the recent scholarly explosion of Barrett/Browning letters. Despite access to expansive archives and unpublished Barrett letters, Markus retells the story of this famous courtship and mythically happy marriage in familiarly sentimental terms: the invalid Barrett rescued from a Jamaican-born, slave-holding Victorian patriarch by the daring young lover and rejuvenated by an adventurous move to Italy. The author refers purply to ``the tears of things in [the Barrett] household'' and to Browning as a ``warriorstill in armor.'' Their brief marriage, cut short by Barrett's premature death, was addled by some tension over Browning's lack of success while his wife's poetic fame soared. Markus overplays the political element of Barrett's poetry—her fairly conventional abolitionism, her progressive feminism, and her support of the Italian Risorgimento- -to the total exclusion of her lyric qualities and prosodic experiments. Markus's critical understanding of Browning's poetry (beyond a few biographical facts) is minimal, though the period of their marriage saw his best work. Such blind spots occur in her individual portraits of the couple as well, such as her omission of Barrett's tyrannical treatment of her domestic staff and Browning's deep anxiety about his creative ability. Without psychological insight or historical grasp, Markus plunges this marital biography into Barrett's unilluminated obsessions with her father, depression, spiritualism, and (possible) Creole ancestry, while Browning is relegated to mere uxoriousness. (Illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Feb. 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-41602-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
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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