An engagingly written contribution to poetry scholarship, although it could have examined Seeger’s contradictions more...
This biography tells the life story of American poet Alan Seeger, best known for a poem published after his death in World War I.
Seeger, the uncle of folk singer Pete Seeger, died at 28 in the Battle of the Somme on July 4, 1916. Although few of his works are remembered now, “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” gained fame; it was one of President John F. Kennedy’s favorite poems. In this biography of Seeger, Hill (Elihu Washburne, 2013) offers a well-researched account that draws in part on material in Harvard University’s Alan Seeger Collection. Hill draws a vivid portrait of Seeger’s idyllic, dreamy boyhood. From an early age, Seeger was determined to reject conformity and live life to the fullest. At Harvard and then in Greenwich Village, he pursued a bohemian life of art, poverty, and freedom; he then moved to Paris in 1912, where he became frustrated by publishers’ rejections of his poetry. In 1914, he joined the French Foreign Legion, and Hill says that he took well to military life, “beaming with joy” at the prospect of battle. After his death, Seeger’s poems—almost miraculously preserved—were published and “greeted with almost universal acclaim,” writes Hill, although according to the Poetry Foundation, the reviews were mixed, citing Seeger’s immaturity as an artist. This is a very readable, well-sourced biography, overall. However, Hill doesn’t question Seeger’s obsession with death in battle, calling his “a glorious legacy as one of history’s most inspiring ‘war poets.’ ” It might have been fruitful to compare him with other poets, such as Wilfrid Owen, who so bitterly and powerfully lacerated the idealism that inspired men to undergo trench warfare. Also, Seeger’s old-fashioned language seems thin compared to the richness and complexity of his Harvard apartment-mate T.S. Eliot’s later work. Could Seeger have achieved more? Maybe—but his sought-for rendezvous with death put an end to that possibility.
An engagingly written contribution to poetry scholarship, although it could have examined Seeger’s contradictions more closely.Pub Date: Aug. 16, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-973794-96-7
Page Count: 203
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 11, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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