A readable, welcome contribution in this bicentennial of the Corps of Discovery’s transcontinental journey.
A well-considered life of Capt. William Clark, reluctant hero of the early frontier.
Retired journalist and People magazine editor Jones does a service in recounting the whole of Clark’s career, bracketed by wars and treaties with the Indian nations. In doing so, Jones misses or glosses over a few matters that have been exercising historians lately: Clark’s relationship with co-captain Meriwether Lewis, his status as a slaveholder and defender of slavery. As Jones notes, Clark rose to hero of exploration somewhat accidentally; though he had been a brave fighter in the wars against the Indians of the Old Northwest during and immediately after the Revolutionary War, it was his older brother George Rogers Clark who earned most of the glory. When Thomas Jefferson sought to enlist George on a military survey of the West, George suggested that William take his place—and, importantly, urged that the surveying party be small so as not to offend the Indians along the way; “ ‘three or four young Men’ could do the job at ‘a Trifling Expense’ over four or five years.” The party that Lewis and Clark led up the Missouri was ten times that size, but still small enough not to be confused for an invading army. As Jones notes, Clark was in the habit of keeping detailed journals even of mundane events, a habit that proved of particular usefulness during the journey. He was also not easily rattled, and a keen student of all that he saw, such that at the end of the overland journey, “Clark knew more about the Indian nations west of the Mississippi than any living American.” Following military service in the War of 1812, Clark put that knowledge to use as a negotiator, one who surely held a paternalistic view of the Indians but did not particularly want to rub them out; his signature, Jones notes, is on more treaties than that of any other American.
A readable, welcome contribution in this bicentennial of the Corps of Discovery’s transcontinental journey.Pub Date: May 24, 2004
ISBN: 0-8090-3041-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2004
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
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SEEN & HEARD
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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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