A thoughtful introduction to a philosophically vital subject.
A collection of essays revolves around a speech President John F. Kennedy gave on the relationship between poetry and power.
In 1963, only weeks before he was assassinated, Kennedy spoke at Amherst College, commemorating the groundbreaking of the Robert Frost Library. In the rhetorically inspiring convocation address, Kennedy discussed the importance of a liberal education to democracy as well as the ways in which poetry functions as a literary check on the untethered employment of political power (“At bottom, he held a deep faith in the spirit of man, and it’s hardly an accident that Robert Frost coupled poetry and power, for he saw poetry as the means of saving power from itself. When power leads man towards arrogance, poetry reminds him of his limitations”). Mills (co-author: 240 Beats Per Minute, 2018, etc.), Worth-Nelson (Night Blind, 2006), and debut editor Bicknell gathered an assemblage of essays from those who were present at the event—which included Kennedy’s remarks after his formal speech and a “convocation address by Archibald MacLeish”—that explore their remembrances. The volume features pieces that reflect on Kennedy’s political legacy and the tumultuous times within which he governed and meditations on the core message of his speech—the profound significance of liberal education for a flourishing democracy. The editors also curate concisely synoptic and illuminating essays on Frost’s career and his shifting relationship with Kennedy. The author read a poem at the president’s inauguration, but after Frost traveled to the Soviet Union, Kennedy felt stung by his betrayal. All the relevant primary source documents are included as well, including Kennedy’s handwritten edits of the speech originally prepared by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. The editors exhaustively furnish a kaleidoscopic view of the event, its historical and political context, and personal ramifications. Some of the essays speak to the inspiration Kennedy provided—activist Ted Nelson discusses his time spent in the Peace Corps, an institution created by an executive order issued by the president. And while the book focuses on Kennedy, a captivating window into Frost’s troubled but prolific life is also provided, along with a consideration of the Whitmanesque way Frost limned the democratic nature of poetry, its power neither reducible to nor independent of its political effects. The book crescendos into a discussion of the political significance of a liberal education, with commentary supplied by well-known luminaries, like journalist/author Fareed Zakaria and actor/director Robert Redford, drawn from diverse fields. While the volume is tinctured by the kind of idealism Kennedy preached, it also delivers a pragmatic acknowledgment of the challenges that face higher education. For example, economist Joseph E. Stiglitz, after observing the ways in which college education will necessarily have to change in order to meet new fiscal realities and technological innovations, argues that its fundamental mission remains unaltered: “Still, for all these changes, the humanist core of a liberal arts education remains unchanged. It is the outgrowth of the Enlightenment, the view that through disciplined reasoning we can come to a better understanding of our world, of our society, and of ourselves.”
A thoughtful introduction to a philosophically vital subject.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-64307-074-2
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Mascot Books
Review Posted Online: Jan. 31, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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