Sometimes stiff, but more often rewarding.
A full-length biography of an American icon.
Miller (History/Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst) paints a detailed portrait of the woman credited with the creation of the Stars and Stripes. In fact, the story of George Washington’s visit to Betsy Ross (1752–1836), in which she showed him that five-pointed stars were easier to make than the six-pointed ones he wanted, is impossible to verify. The documentary record shows only that Ross, who earned her living as an upholsterer, was one of several Philadelphians paid by the Continental Congress to make flags for the American forces during the Revolution. With so little evidence for Ross’s main claim to fame, Miller digs into colonial and early federal history to examine the life of a working-class woman of the era. She covers Ross’s Quaker upbringing, her apprenticeship in the trade she would follow all her life, her three marriages, the impact of the Revolution on daily life and the growth of the young republic. Ross’s circle of relatives and acquaintances gives the author plenty of fodder for a survey of the changes in politics, religion, domestic life, social customs and economic trends of the time. For example, we get a look at conditions in an English prison where captured American sailors, including her second and third husbands, were held during the war; at controversies within the Philadelphia Friends meeting, which had expelled the young upholsterer for marrying outside the fold; and at the Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic of 1793, in which she lost her father and her sister. With copious notes and an extensive bibliography, Miller provides an exhaustive picture of the life of a craftswoman in colonial times, though readers with only a casual interest in the subject may find it long-winded and digressive.
Sometimes stiff, but more often rewarding.Pub Date: May 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-8050-8297-5
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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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