paper 0-9643893-9-8 A thorough if somewhat plodding biography. Out of the heartbreak and ravaging difficulties of her life, Blixen (better known under her nom de plume, Isak Dinesen) shaped not only several lasting works of literature but also a formidable persona. Although she died of malnutrition in1962 at age 77, that persona still inspires tremendous fascination. Donelson clearly felt its pull. Indeed, she could hardly have avoided it: The Iowan biographer’s own farm in Kenya, where she lived from 1978 to 1980, overlooked what had been Blixen’s property. Perhaps inspired by the reality of that view, however, Donelson has committed herself to separating the facts of Blixen’s life from her self-created myth. The result is a book that traces the transformation of an unassuming young Danish bride into a regal if physically fragile grand dame of the veldt (Blixen went to Africa in 1914, when she was 28). In the course of her narrative, Donelson, an M.D., succeeds in debunking with alacrity and insight some of the commonly held assumptions about Blixen’s medical history. She doubts, for example, that Blixen’s later physical ailments were the result of syphilis (contracted from her husband during their first year of marriage). More likely, they were caused by the arsenic she took for years as a tonic. The discussions of Blixen’s physical state and frequent bouts of depression are concrete and convincing; it’s a pity Donelson succeeds less well with Blixen the writer. The biography lacks a vital sense of the woman as an artist, though it brings to light a wealth of detail about her African experiences, from the ill-treatment she received from her husband to the longing she felt for aristocratic English hunter Denys Finch Hatton. Perhaps Blixen must remain strangely unfathomable: a creature wrought in her own imagination and projected onto the page.
Pub Date: Aug. 25, 1998
ISBN: 0-9643893-8-X
Page Count: 440
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
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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