Far too polite for its—or our—good.
Fulsome, over-affectionate treatment of the doyenne who dominated the etiquette market for decades.
Claridge (Norman Rockwell, 2001, etc.) begins with a comparison between Emily Post (1872–1960) and anthropologist Ruth Benedict—and that’s just a taste of the puffery to come. The author proceeds to the most humiliating experience of Post’s life: her philandering husband’s infidelity in 1905 and the splashy newspaper coverage of it. Then the narrative moves back to Emily’s family history. Her father, Bruce Price, was a noted architect, and the little girl grew up in a world of servants and high society. At her 1889 debut, “she glowed” as the belle of the ball, according to Claridge, and that was the night she fell in love with Edwin Post. Their marriage, however, quickly disintegrated; the author describes Edwin as an alpha male in almost a prehistoric sense. Emily turned to writing and to entertaining; she was, writes Claridge, “especially pretty these days, trim with a rosy complexion, a tireless hostess.” This sort of treacly prose oversweetens far too many paragraphs. The author’s research seems thorough, but her documentation is uneven; several quotations from Edith Wharton have no endnote to identify them. Post published a few lightweight novels and gradually established herself as a minor New York literary figure. (She attended Mark Twain’s 70th birthday bash.) She seems to have hatched the idea for Etiquette in 1911; the first edition appeared in 1922, the 14th and final in 1955. The book’s enormous popularity finally brought her the celebrity she’d long craved. She had a newspaper column and a radio show; the pages of the nation’s women’s magazines were open to her; she wrote an engaging book about a cross-country car trip in 1915. Post was up-to-date enough to float an unsuccessful idea for a TV show, but she slowly faded away with dementia in the ’50s.
Far too polite for its—or our—good.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-375-50921-6
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2008
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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