An intimate correspondence whose references to friends and acquaintances reads like a sexually explicit Who’s Who of Cambridge and Bloomsbury before WWI. Hale (English/Univ. of Guam) has undertaken the publication of Rupert Brooke’s correspondence with his friend James Strachey in an effort to correct common misconceptions caused by the withholding of information about Brooke’s personal life—including and especially his homosexuality. In short, he aims to prove that “Brooke the man was not the same as Brooke the legend.” If, as some critics assert, Brooke represented a time and a generation of Englishmen before WWI, his wide-ranging letters provide a full cast of players and the topics that occupied them. Strachey, translator of Freud’s work into English and younger brother of Lytton Strachey, knew Brooke from boyhood and later fell in love with the handsome, golden boy when the two met up at Cambridge. Both members of the exclusive Cambridge group, the Apostles, Brooke and Strachey wrote of their most intimate feelings, as well as their impressions of mutual friends. It was an illustrious group, with members such as Maynard Keynes, Duncan Grant, George Mallory, matched only in their position in British society and culture by the other subjects of these honest, cruel, and frequently funny exchanges: Bloomsbury friends Virginia and Leonard Woolf and Vanessa Bell, author Henry James, and Fabian socialist Beatrice Webb. Hale deftly guides us through the correspondence from 1905 to Brooke’s death on his way to Gallipoli. What begins as a youthful exchange between the seriously in-love Strachey and the teasing and distant Brooke gradually shifts its focus to Brooke the man and writer, as he continues to tease and torment his old friend with all manner of news about explicit sexual relations with both men and women and about his increasingly dismal view of life (and women). A lively introduction to Brooke the man and artist (Strachey, too) and the Edwardian culture from which they emerged. (24 illustrations)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-300-07004-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1998
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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