by Mona Z. Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 1, 2004
Nonetheless, a valuable first attempt to restore a heroic figure to his rightful place in American cultural and political...
Serviceable biography of the pioneering African-American actor, staunch civil-rights advocate, and blacklist victim.
Before he ever walked onstage, Canada Lee (1907–52) had been a classical violinist, a professional jockey, and a prizewinning boxer, and he fought throughout his acting career for roles that reflected the full range of black people's characters and experiences. His biographer, a former reporter for the Miami Herald, adequately outlines Lee's achievements. He played Banquo in Orson Welles' “voodoo Macbeth,” Caliban in The Tempest, and Daniel de Bosola in The Duchess of Malfi—the first actor of color to perform a classical role in whiteface. He became a star in 1941 as Bigger Thomas in the stage version of Native Son and took every opportunity provided by his new fame to proclaim that America did not give equal rights to all. (A patriotic supporter of the war effort, he fiercely denounced segregation in the army.) Lee did his best to make the black steward in Hitchcock's Lifeboat less stereotyped and created a dignified, noble character in the boxing drama Body and Soul. But his long history of progressive activism got him named as a “fellow traveler” in 1949 by several journalists, including his longtime friend Ed Sullivan (the two never spoke again). Work dried up at home, while a role overseas in the film of Cry, the Beloved Country made him a vehement opponent of South Africa's vicious apartheid system. Stress and anxiety exacerbated the health problems that led to his death from kidney failure at age 45. Smith, who had the cooperation of Lee's widow, paints an attractive portrait of a man who loved a good time, always offered a helping hand to his friends, and continued to support the causes he believed in even after he knew what the consequences would be. The author’s pedestrian prose and laundry-list approach to narrative, alas, don't spark much excitement.
Nonetheless, a valuable first attempt to restore a heroic figure to his rightful place in American cultural and political history.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-571-21142-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Faber & Faber/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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