by Kevin Dann ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 3, 2017
Thoreau emerges from this admiring portrait as a man richly connected to the cosmos.
A sympathetic biography of the famed 19th-century transcendentalist.
Commemorating the bicentennial of the birth of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862), historian and naturalist Dann (Lewis Creek Lost and Found, 2001, etc.) offers a reappraisal of the writer’s life, focusing on Thoreau’s connection to, and celebration of, the invisible and ineffable. To support his analysis, Dann draws largely from Thoreau’s journals, letters, and published writings as well as a three-volume work by Emerson scholar Kenneth Walter Cameron, Transcendentalists and Minerva: Cultural Backgrounds of the American Renaissance with Fresh Discoveries in the Intellectual Climate of Emerson, Alcott, and Thoreau (1958), one of the few secondary sources he references. Dann does not differ from other biographers who examine Thoreau’s self-description as a mystic, but he underscores the significance of mysticism, pantheism, and empathy to the writer’s personality and life choices. Based on Thoreau’s admiration for Sir Walter Raleigh and Raleigh’s “esteem for astrology,” Dann asserts that Thoreau “was convinced that the stars played down into human life.” Thoreau articulated “his sense of his own personal destiny” by using “the language of the stars” and believed in a personal guiding star. Dann explains Thoreau’s depression in 1852 as caused by “a planetary configuration called the black moon." Dann also asserts that Thoreau was attuned to “the ways of the faerie world,” although he revealed his encounters with faeries in “an understated, cryptic form of reporting” so as not to incite his contemporaries’ derision. Although Thoreau thought mesmerism and spiritualism were “idiotic,” he was fascinated by the “invisible fluid” that formed the basis of popular vitalist theories. Despite proclaiming “repugnance for the Church,” Thoreau, Dann believes, “identified with Christ the fellow heretic.” Because he privileges Thoreau’s reveries over his philosophical and political grounding, Dann’s argument at times seems insistent rather than persuasive, but this should appeal to readers interested in Thoreau’s more esoteric beliefs.
Thoreau emerges from this admiring portrait as a man richly connected to the cosmos.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-399-18466-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: TarcherPerigee
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2016
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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