A meticulously crafted, elegantly recounted biography of the renowned Spanish poet and playwright. Born in 1898, Federico Garc°a Lorca came of age during the great flowering of Spanish modernism that produced such notables, and friends, as Salvador Dali and Luis Bu§uel, and, arguably, led to the Spanish Civil War. Lorca’s father, a wealthy Andalusian landowner, usually indulged and funded his son’s poetic and dramatic aspirations, paying for the printing of his first two books and financing his first play. These efforts attracted some positive critical attention yet were financial disasters. Lorca largely shrugged them off: “fortunately I don—t have to make a living from my pen. If I did, I wouldn—t be so happy.” He had the brash self-confidence of genius, and though his parents insisted he get a law degree, he refused to settle down into a quiet, quotidian existence. He had enormous energy, organizing folk-song festivals, writing puppet shows, giving lectures. Slowly but definitively, he became a major cultural phenomenon. His plays made some money, his poetry books went into second editions. However, it was two trips abroad, to New York City and Buenos Aires, that secured Lorca’s reputation and allowed him to find his full poetic voice. Although he still wrote the occasional poem, he began to turn increasingly to poetic drama, creating such classics as Blood Wedding. He also began to come to terms with his homosexuality, in both his art and life. Despite being essentially apolitical, in Spain’s heated political climate, Lorca was strongly identified with the Republican left. It is a tragic testament to the power of his work that in the early days of the Spanish Civil War, he was arrested and executed. He was only 38. Stainton, who has written widely for scholarly journals and other publications, has done a remarkable job of capturing the rich fullness of Lorca’s short, brilliant life. (illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: June 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-374-19097-6
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1999
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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