Cohen, the editor of Carroll's herculean correspondence, succeeds with the man's Victorian character—both the academic and the eccentric elements—but misses the point of Carroll's pointless nonsense. Although Charles Lutwidge Dodgson kept his professional life of mathematical rectitude distinct from his private friendships with little girls and Lewis Carroll's nonsense, his life has had steady interest since his death, from Victorian damage control and Freudian psychoanalytic autopsies to, most recently, Derek Hudson's lively biography and Anne Clark's more somber one. Cohen's falls somewhere between the latter two in mood, but its new research and resources are unmatched. Carroll's childhood ironically receives a sketchy characterization, despite all the details of his humorous juvenilia, mathematical precocity, and, Cohen implies, a repressed battle of wills with his father the archdeacon. Dodgson the don emerges as a solid if myriad figure—keen amateur photographer; earnest, semisuccessful lecturer; scrupulously moral deacon; writer of pamphlets and squibs; and sentimental collector of ``child-friends.'' Although Carroll's relations with Alice Liddell and her sisters have been researched almost ad nauseam, Cohen centers in on their unexplained break (the relevant pages in Carroll's diary were posthumously destroyed by his niece). Through careful sifting of later evidence, Cohen supports the idea that Carroll somehow offended Mrs. Liddell's matchmaking sensibilities. He goes on to draw inconclusive connections between his outpourings of generalized spiritual remorse and his happy times with the Liddell girls recorded in the diary. Carroll's relations with little girls in general had elements of both the elder brother and the romantic, although there is no suggestion of sexual misconduct. After drubbing outlandish interpretations of the Alice books, Cohen instead suggests biographic allegories, rites of passage for both Alice Liddell and Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. Cohen sees Dodgson finally as a talented, upright, melancholy figure, but does not fully integrate Carroll into this protean man. (135 illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Nov. 12, 1995
ISBN: 0-679-42298-6
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 1995
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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