by Mary Gordon ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2000
and keeps on happening, to this day. (First serial to Commonweal; author tour)
Illiterate adolescent peasant girl, prompted by inner voices, turns knight-redeemer of her country—temporarily. A life of the
martyr Joan of Arc (1412–31), presented (contradictions intact) by a lifelong admirer. Gordon (Seeing Through Places, 2000, etc.), whose works often portray women confronting faith, pinpoints how “Gift, chance, accident, coincidence” converged during the Hundred Years” War to manifest such a heroine, crusading to crown an unwilling Dauphin as God’s elect who would ransom France. Gordon highlights how Joan vindicated here prophetic status by manipulating symbols (her divinely designed battle standard, her armor, and her male dress) to leverage untrustworthy men: the king who soon shunned his champion, the companions-in-arms who fought then flitted, the French royals who sold her out, and the accusers who tried and burned her as a heretic. Gordon qualifies the myths surrounding this incredibly brave and resilient down-to-earth na‹f: Joan was surprised when a wound she “foretold” actually hurt, and shaken when confronted with war’s human misery. A chronology stresses the enforced brevity of Joan’s career: a fitful tactician alive only in action (when Joan let “her military judgment and her religious scruples” diverge), both her victories and her charisma vanished soon enough. Gordon (like Joan’s rehabilitators) does not discuss “the difficult issues of inspiration and its verification,” however, leaving us to wonder about the question that stands at the center of the legend: namely, whose heavenly directives are genuine? And who can we know? All contention is focused upon that strong unviolated female body, remote from standard hierarchies of sex, class, deference, chivalry, orthodoxy. Though analogies intended as timeless fall short (“Girls aren’t supposed to brag”), Gordon trenchantly discerns how virginity granted autonomy, and one senses that Joan’s mission required neither gender. Surveying the manifold purposes served by this idiosyncratic saint, Gordon characterizes her best: “the patroness of the vivid life.” A bold “biographical meditation” that persuades the skeptic to meditate on the inexplicable something Joan made happen,
and keeps on happening, to this day. (First serial to Commonweal; author tour)Pub Date: April 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-670-88537-1
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2000
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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