Foot adds to his reputation as a biographer with this well-researched and skillfully presented work focusing on Wells as a socialist. According to Foot (Debts of Honour, 1981, etc.), himself a staunch socialist and former leader of Britain's Labour Party, ``this is a book about Socialism, but personalities [are] constantly allowed to intrude.'' And so they do, as the book moves through Wells's life, from his parents, whose difficult existences gave Wells his first nudge toward radicalism, to his wives and lovers, to his political and literary friends cum sparring partners. Yet what finally emerges from the interactions and influences is Wells as a complex and compelling individual who seizes ideas and charges into what he sees as the problems of his time. Foot, who regards Wells as ``an artist of the first order,'' makes a firmly sympathetic advocate, whether defending his subject from accusations of anti-Semitism and racism or arguing for the individuality of Wells's female characters. Not that he unthinkingly objects to Wells being taken to task: Young Rebecca West is introduced via her scathing review of Wells's novel Marriage, which Foot quotes in its entirety ``to show the power of the invective.'' However, when its subject can be shown to advantage, the text fairly hums with satisfaction, as when discussing the insights into early 20th century politics and society in Wells's Tono-Bungay or reporting the writer's attacks on imperialists (among them Winston Churchill). Throughout, what gives the work its shape and coherence is Wells's continuing interest in what Foot calls ``real politics, the mixture of ideas and action,'' and his role in the lively public conversation of his time. Complementing rather than supplanting existing works on Wells, this is valuable to anyone seriously interested in the writer and his works or in the history of English socialism. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-887178-04-X
Page Count: 344
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
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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