An exciting work of scholarship by a masterly poet.
A dense, spirited, deeply thoughtful prequel to English poet and editor Schmidt’s Lives of the Poets (1999).
Assuming that his audience is as devoted as he is to the importance of classical texts, the author argues that readers should not be “impoverished by a pragmatic sense of historical fact” and miss out on the fun of reconstructing the dauntingly inaccessible lives of the poets who created them. In his magisterial introduction, Schmidt sets out the physical evidence discovered over the millennia in papyri, tablets, amphora, and the like, then elucidates the function of scribes and libraries. “For the ancients, poetry socialized people,” he writes, emphasizing the oral tradition that dominated in Homer’s heroic age. By the fifth century b.c., the act of writing down poems already invited distortion and embellishment. In 15 chapters, Schmidt sifts through the available evidence—often elusive, sibylline, and apocryphal—and conflicting scholarship to give shape to the lives of poets as celebrated as Pindar (favored by English poets) and Apollonius (“who understands, honours and even privileges the female perspective”), as well as the more obscure Mimnermus of Colophon (“an elegist of pleasure”) and Hipponax of Ephesus (“a notable sourpuss”). The author treats two female poets, Sappho and Corinna of Tanagra (the latter may have beaten Pindar in poetry contests) while delicately acknowledging the “rebarbative” (repellent) nature of the classical male perspective, which puts off female readers and translators. Schmidt devotes three chapters to Homer and his legend, examining everything from the bard’s paternity to theories of collaborative composition and the archaeological finds that have borne out the verses’ topographical accuracy. The author has traveled to the places inhabited by these poets and endows their lives with an intimate sense of the physical landscape. Like the transmission of these texts over the ages, each of Schmidt’s chapters comment on its predecessor, and the reader willing to stick with his tireless documentation will be amply rewarded.
An exciting work of scholarship by a masterly poet.Pub Date: March 28, 2005
ISBN: 0-375-41120-8
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2004
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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