An intimate and singular perspective on the Romantics—and race.
In search of lost Black lives.
Literary scholar Nabugodi melds memoir and deep archival research to investigate six prominent writers—William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats, and Lord Byron—with the goal of tracing the Romantics’ “racial imaginary”: that is, “how the existence of racial slavery infested their creative imaginations.” As a biracial Black woman, she brings an acute sensitivity to her search, of texts and artifacts, for “undead legacies of slavery.” At St. John’s College, Cambridge, she visits the Slavery and Abolition Collection, which houses documents representing debates, pro and con, about enslavement and whose holdings include Wordsworth’s favorite teacup. Like other Britons of his time, she observes, Wordsworth benefited from slave labor each time he mindlessly stirred sugar into his tea. Letters from plantation managers to British owners, conveying slaves’ valuations, horrify her; she is buoyed by reports of resistance and escape by those slaves whom owners damned as “distempered.” Among many disquieting discoveries, she finds that Coleridge, once an ardent abolitionist, became a white supremacist after encountering precepts of scientific racism, which placed the so-called Caucasian race at the pinnacle of a racial hierarchy and Blacks at the bottom. Both Keats’ death mask and his poetic allusions point to a reverence for classical Greek—and white—aesthetics. Byron’s orthopedic boots, which he wore to compensate for a physical impairment, lead Nabugodi to consider a link between disability and Blackness. Byron, like Black people, was made to feel inferior—even cursed—by others’ attitudes about his physical difference. “Romantic-era ideals about beauty and grandeur,” she writes, “are impossible to disentangle from the period’s white supremacist worldview.” Each of the figures she investigates, she discovers to her dismay, sorrow, and anger, was intricately embedded in the slave economy.
An intimate and singular perspective on the Romantics—and race.Pub Date: July 29, 2025
ISBN: 9780593536469
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2025
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
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