A fresh and insightful perspective on a major historical figure.
Scrupulous research informs a new biography of the charismatic and influential African-American abolitionist.
Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) has been the subject of many fine biographies, as Fought (History/LeMoyne Coll.; A History of Mystic Connecticut: From Pequot Village to Tourist Town, 2007, etc.) acknowledges, but none examines as intimately Douglass’ relationships with women: his mother, slave mistresses, wives, daughters, and especially the white women who supported his causes throughout his career. His life, argues the author persuasively, was shaped by women. The first was Sophia Auld, his slave master’s wife, who spent a year teaching the young Frederick Johnson to read, until her husband forbade it. Nevertheless, “the subversive power of literacy” changed the boy’s life. He fled from enslavement to marry Anna Murray, a free woman, who shared his aspirations to move into the middle class; when they married in New York, both took the surname Douglass, hoping it would distinguish them from the many Johnsons who were sought by slave-catchers. Anna was illiterate, and although Fought portrays her as a source of strength for her husband, she could not offer the intellectual companionship and worldliness of other women who gravitated to him. At anti-slavery meetings, abolitionist societies, and women’s rights organizations, many participants were drawn to Douglass, a man some called the African Prince, “conscious of his dignity and power, grand in his physical proportions, majestic in his wrath.” Fought focuses on the British abolitionist Julia Griffiths and the German reformer Ottilie Assing, with whom Douglass could discuss politics, literature, and religion. For a time, he brought both women to live in his household, where he and his guests would retire for hours to his study, generating “marital disagreement” and slanderous gossip. Because Griffiths and Assing were white, Douglass’ critics took an opportunity to attack his morality, a campaign that intensified after the widowed Douglass married a white woman. Fought highlights ferocious in-fighting among anti-slavery groups, the Douglass family’s close ties to John Brown, and Douglass’ evolving political views.
A fresh and insightful perspective on a major historical figure.Pub Date: May 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-19-978237-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 5, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
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
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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