Gracelessly written, but indispensable to students of Ellison, Oklahoma City in the 1920s, or Harlem in the ’40s.
Painstaking biography covering the first half of the noted African-American writer’s life, through his acceptance of the National Book Award in 1953.
Ellison (1914–94) grew up in Oklahoma City. His beloved father died when Ralph was three; thereafter he shuttled from address to address with his mother, whose ferocious self-respect made both employment and housing opportunities precarious. The intelligent boy’s struggles with poverty and racial strife were mitigated by exposure to a good library, a visionary music teacher, and exceptional local jazz. Later, he won a scholarship from Tuskegee Institute's prestigious music school to study trumpet and conducting. The need for money led him in 1936 to New York, where he was introduced to Langston Hughes and within weeks had shifted his orientation to literature and left-wing politics. With Hughes as his mentor, Ellison launched himself in literary and political circles both up- and downtown. He served as editor of The Negro Quarterly and consolidated his reputation as a critic with his advocacy of Richard Wright's Native Son. Jackson (English/Howard Univ.) illuminates the complicated ways in which Ellison's career was shaped by his relationship with Wright, with whom he shared a rural background, modernist tastes, and an ambivalent relationship with the Communist Party, and whose success spurred Ellison's desire to write fiction. After WWII, his second wife Fanny's income and companionship allowed him to concentrate on the protean novel that eventually became Invisible Man, the masterpiece that catapulted him to fame in 1952. Jackson's scholarship is thorough, his insights valuable, but his prose, marred by idiomatic blunders and muddy sentence structure, is only just adequate to convey the complex temperament of his subject. Ambitious, original, dedicated, and lucky, Ellison seems at once isolated from and excessively dependent on his professional milieu; despite the biographer’s emphasis on effort and integrity rewarded, sadness and desperation haunt this life.
Gracelessly written, but indispensable to students of Ellison, Oklahoma City in the 1920s, or Harlem in the ’40s.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2001
ISBN: 0-471-35414-7
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Wiley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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