Strong, wonderfully absorbing life of Beat bard Allen Ginsberg (b. 1926) that breaks new ground in its critical analyses of the poet's work; by Schumacher (Reasons to Believe, 1988—not reviewed). Readers might think that after Barry Miles's massive and masterful Ginsberg (1989), an equally massive biography coming so closely behind is more than one has the stamina for—but no. Schumacher goes over the same events in Ginsberg's life as Miles did, and does so with an intelligence that bonds us to the emotionally battered poet. Unlike Miles, he cuts off his biography in 1980: The bulk of Ginsberg's major works had appeared by then (one should have 1985's Collected Poems at hand to follow the critical argument). Also, unlike Miles, Schumacher uses few interviews, hoping to avoid mythologizing by going to original sources contemporary with the events described—largely collected archives of Ginsbergiana and Ginsberg's voluminous letters and journals kept from childhood, which form a vivid autobiography of events as they happened. Ginsberg's genie sprang from the marriage of his poet father and mad mother—a wildly outspoken radical—and was unstoppered by Blake, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and Jack Kerouac's spontaneous bop prosody. The young poet found his voice in ``Howl''—and what a voice it was. Schumacher takes us through the poem's drafts until it was shaped and given its final verbal lift and meticulously forceful imitation of spontaneity. One is struck time and again by Ginsberg's originality and the richly surreal syntax that opens doors to his most private experience. His Buddhism, raids on the political establishment, and Beat friends Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gary Snyder, Gregory Corso, et al. get full treatment, as do his gay love affairs, especially with mainly heterosexual Peter Orlovsky. Ginsberg's bottomless aid to the bedeviled, learned in childhood, is stunning. Rings the doorbell on your heart, your brain, and your love of great verse. (Sixteen pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-312-08179-0
Page Count: 752
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
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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