Although Lear had access to volumes of diaries and letters, her shaping of Potter's intriguing life is rather blockheaded.
A stolid biography by environmental historian Lear (Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature, 1997) that gets at the facts of Victorian Potter's life but does not bother addressing motivations and thwarted ambition.
Born in 1866, Potter, a child of wealthy Unitarians in the calico manufacturing business, enjoyed a privileged upbringing between South Kensington, London, and the country homes of her grandparents in the Lake District and in Perthshire, Scotland. These locales stimulated her early interest in natural history, often a passion for the Victorians. Never sent to school as her younger brother was, but taught at home by tutors, Potter demonstrated an early talent for drawing, developed by copying animals and plants from nature, especially fungi and lichen viewed through a microscope. She eventually developed some theories about fungi reproduction, but they were dismissed as amateurish. (Lear argues that she could have become an expert in any number of fields, such as botany, archaeology, geology and mycology.) Approaching spinsterhood, and seething against a domineering mother, she first published some of her animal designs in holiday cards, then grew determined to become financially independent. Her first Peter Rabbit work had been fashioned in letters to the children of her former governess, and then published as a little book by Frederick Warne in 1902. Her anthropomorphized rabbits were an instant hit, and they were followed quickly by tales of Squirrel Nutkin, the tailor of Gloucester, Hunca Munca, et al. She was for a time engaged to be married to her publisher's son, Norman Warne, but he died. Potter went on to achieve self-sufficiency with the purchase of her own Lake District home at Sawrey in 1905, and she later settled down to happy married farm life with Anglican barrister William Heelis.
Although Lear had access to volumes of diaries and letters, her shaping of Potter's intriguing life is rather blockheaded.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2007
ISBN: 0-312-36934-4
Page Count: 512
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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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