Stories full of faith and struggle lose none of their mythological quality.
A prolific British historian explores the makeup of the motley crew—both “Saints” (Puritan separatists) and “Strangers” (economic migrants)—who ventured by sea to a foreign American land four centuries ago.
Whittock (When God Was King: Rebels & Radicals of the Civil War & Mayflower Generation, 2018, etc.), an engaging writer who uses (sometimes overly) exclamatory prose, discusses the lives of 14 of these extraordinary characters, out of the original 130 Mayflower travelers, each in their own chapter. Throughout, the author emphasizes the stunning hardship of that first voyage as many of the English separatists, then living in the Netherlands, left everything behind to plunge into the unknown. Moreover, the crew was originally headed to Virginia on a different ship whose chronic leaking forced them to delay for months before setting out in the Mayflower, and then they were driven by severe storms back up the Atlantic coast to present-day Plymouth in November 1620. Fully half of the total died within a year in America, unable to survive the cold and meager provisions of the first winter. Whittock examines each of his chosen’s backstory and upbringing in England, such as the Puritan leader William Bradford, radicalized as a teenager and one of the community in Leiden, who, with his wife, left their small son to sail to America—tragically, as his wife died shortly after arrival. The author’s female stories prove especially poignant—e.g., Susanna White, the mother of the first child born in America; and Mary More, the orphaned, indentured 4-year-old servant and child of an adulterous father; she died shortly after arrival, probably from neglect. Whittock also includes a fantastic biography of so-called Squanto (Tisquantum), who had been kidnapped by Englishmen earlier in his life, spoke English, and was returning to his native land, which was denuded of population due to the devastation of European-spread disease.
Stories full of faith and struggle lose none of their mythological quality.Pub Date: Aug. 6, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-64313-132-0
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 11, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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