A solid, much-needed work of literary biography, stronger on matters critical but a touch less absorbing, because less...
A searching life of the eminent literary critic and journalist 1895-1972).
It was Edmund Wilson’s conceit, first voiced in the essay “The Wound and the Bow” and often repeated, that the artist bears an internal wound whose healing lies in making art, but who can never be healed. Ever the man of letters—he died at a table strewn with galleys and “a dog-eared copy of The Mystery of Edwin Drood, with which Dickens had been struggling at his death”—Wilson bore psychic wounds of his own. Perhaps self-servingly, he insisted that the man (or woman) of letters was also a wounded hero, and “Bunny” Wilson was surely something more than ink-stained drudge; as Dabney (English/Univ. of Wyoming; Edmund Wilson: Centennial Reflections, 1997) observes, he lived up to the challenge of a kind of Hemingwayesque life, lived “all the way up,” always by his wits and with his pen. (Only late in life, and then grudgingly, did Wilson accept academic largess, and then he irritated its bestower, Paul Horgan, by asking whether Horgan wrote.) Dabney follows Wilson’s brilliant trajectory from protected youth to Jazz Age high-liver and liver-damaged “literary alcoholic,” from sexual naïf to the chronicler of suburban sexual high-jinks in Memoirs of Hecate County, from somewhat snooty highbrow to much more worldly highbrow. For all the life changes—and all the adventures and misadventures in the company of Edna Millay, Mary McCarthy, the Algonquian Circle, Vladimir Nabokov and such—Wilson remained consistent to at least a few principles and pleasures, confessing, for instance, “that he was never happier than when telling people about a work they were unfamiliar with in a language they didn’t know.” That he did so in the pages of The New Yorker, The New Republic and Vanity Fair ought to make his admirers—and Wilson still has many, having, as Dabney observes, passed the ten-year test for longevity long ago—yearn for better, more lettered days.
A solid, much-needed work of literary biography, stronger on matters critical but a touch less absorbing, because less sensational, than Jeffrey Meyers’s Edmund Wilson (1995).Pub Date: Aug. 3, 2005
ISBN: 0-374-11312-2
Page Count: 624
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2005
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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