A beautifully written life of India's once-famous Nobel laureate who is now largely unknown to Western readers. In the first half of the 20th century, Rabindranath Tagore (18611941) was widely known in the West as a mediator between Eastern and Western culture. His poems, plays, paintings, and music remain enormously influential in India, especially in Bengal. Dutta, a Calcutta-born teacher now living in England, and Robinson, literary editor of the Times Higher Education Supplement, assume that Western readers need a complete reintroduction to Tagore. The result is a leisurely, life-and-times biography written from a detached, objective point of view and full of useful explanatory detail. Dutta and Robinson balance the cultural, political, family, and religious influences on Tagore without settling on any one as predominant. Because Tagore participated in so many aspects of Indian politics and literary culture, and knew so many key figures not only in India but in the West, his biography serves as an introduction to basic features of modern Indian history and culture. Although usually deferential to his point of view, the authors are also sensitive to Tagore's contradictions. A beneficiary of British rule, he agonized over the plight of peasants on his family estates but never questioned the legitimacy of private ownership. He supported British rule until the national movement made it unfashionable. After embracing nationalism, he distanced himself, not only from violent extremists, but from political mainstreamers such as Gandhi. The book becomes livelier when the authors lose patience with Tagore, particularly over his hypocrisy in advocating rights for women that he never extended to the women of his own family. As many-sided as Tagore himself, this biography will introduce readers not only to one of the giants of 20th-century literature, but also to the encounter between European and South Asian culture under colonial rule. (48 pages photos)
Pub Date: Dec. 4, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-14030-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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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