Insatiable curiosity and fierce pursuit of fact combine to create a graceful exploration of worlds old and new.
Impressive if necessarily incomplete biography of a 16th-century French artist who survived both deprivation and Spanish attacks to produce stunning, controversial images of the New World.
Harvey (The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime, 2000) reports that his peripatetic research into the life and work of Jacques Le Moyne de Morgues (1533–88) was alternately exhilarating and frustrating. For nearly every shred of information about Le Moyne that the author was able to coax from history’s unyielding fingers, there were much larger pieces he could not get. Still, his discoveries are intriguing. Le Moyne sailed for Florida with a French expedition in 1564, charged with making a visual record of all they encountered. He was better at illustration than cartography, Harvey shows; Le Moyne’s fanciful map of Florida is a hoot. Even his astonishing engravings of the local Timucua Indians are controversial, as they occasionally show the Timucua practicing European methods of cultivation or brandishing weapons unknown in North America at the time. The author attributes some of these inaccuracies to Dutch engraver Theodor de Bry, whose copper-plate reproductions alone remain of Le Moyne’s Florida work. Harvey devotes much of his text to the brief but bloody Florida period, described in accounts by several survivors of the Spanish slaughter aimed at eliminating France’s tentative toehold in the New World. He then shifts focus to Le Moyne’s post-Florida career and the rediscovery of his work centuries later. The Calvinist artist fled France during a period of Catholic brutality in the 1580s and moved to the Blackfriars region of London, where he produced a lovely book of plant illustrations and served as consultant to yet another man with vast, ultimately unrealized New World visions, Sir Walter Raleigh. Harvey spends the final pages on those who rescued Le Moyne from obscurity.
Insatiable curiosity and fierce pursuit of fact combine to create a graceful exploration of worlds old and new.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6120-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
