On this vicarious trip, Damrosch effectively demonstrates why Tocqueville proved “a superb interpreter of American culture.”
The journey and insights of Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859) in America.
In 1831, Tocqueville and his fellow French aristocrat Gustave de Beaumont traversed a burgeoning, teeming America in the grip of territorial expansion and commercial explosion. They were amazed by the young country's industrious, plainspoken, egalitarian and largely middle-class ways. Tocqueville was privileged to witness, as Damrosch (Literature/Harvard Univ.; Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius, 2005, etc.) notes of their visit to the fledging city of Cincinnati, “impressive young professionals who were energetically building a civilization.” The author traces this journey, familiar to readers of Tocqueville but always wonderfully entertaining, while lending his own astute observations. Tocqueville and Beaumont set out on official government business to examine the prison reforms being instigated in America and bring back new ideas to France. Tocqueville admitted later the penitentiary system was a good "pretext" for examining the whole American experiment, from marriage to government to slavery. He and Beaumont kept copious notes, from which Damrosch translates for the first time here. Curiously, the men barely spoke English but gradually learned to appreciate the idiomatic simplicity of American speech. For example, Tocqueville was eager to see forests and Indians, as the Frenchmen were steeped in romantic notions of Chateaubriand's America, and marveled that there was no word for wilderness in French. They visited 17 of the 24 states and the Western territories, of which Ohio was the frontier. They finally found in Boston a polite society much like they had known in Europe, though they made themselves at home everywhere among shopkeepers, farmers or prison guards. Politics in Washington, D.C., disappointed them.
On this vicarious trip, Damrosch effectively demonstrates why Tocqueville proved “a superb interpreter of American culture.”Pub Date: April 20, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-27817-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 25, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
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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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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