by Neil Powell ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2004
British poet and biographer Powell (Roy Fuller, not reviewed) displays an impressive knowledge of his subject and a delight...
A fresh, thoroughly enjoyable, and much-needed account of the early English Romantic, a favorite with his fellow poets.
Hailing from storm-tossed coast of East Anglia—his hometown of Aldeburgh now lies beneath the North Sea—Crabbe (1754–1832) was the son of a salt-tax collector with thwarted intellectual ambitions. Unfit for the usual sea-vessel work as a warehouseman, young George was educated first to become a surgeon, at which he did not excel, and then as a Church of England curate. His first attempts at poetry, The Library and The Village, reveal Augustan high-handedness; he was well-steeped in the works of Milton and Pope. But Crabbe was no rationalist son of the Enlightenment: his intense interest in botany (“Give me a wild, wide fen, in a foggy day”), use of opium, gloomy temper, and marriage to a woman inclined toward mental instability all helped produce the astonishing work of Romantic sensibility that would make his name. “Peter Grimes,” a poem about a melancholy old fisherman whose young apprentice boys disappear under suspicious circumstances, went on to haunt the imagination of E.M. Forster and Benjamin Britten, whose opera rescued Crabbe's work from becoming “dead as mutton,” as Somerset Maugham put it. With the death of his wife, Crabbe moved to Trowbridge and developed epistolary flirtations with young ladies; he made friends with Walter Scott and eventually trekked to Scotland. Although Crabbe’s work became unfashionable—and still is; the most recent biography was Neville Blackburne's The Restless Ocean, in 1972—Powell makes a persuasive case for his importance to such later writers as Dickens, Eliot, and Hardy, as well as Philip Larkin in the 20th century.
British poet and biographer Powell (Roy Fuller, not reviewed) displays an impressive knowledge of his subject and a delight in close reading of the texts that make this a surprisingly accessible biography.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7126-8999-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Pimlico/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2004
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by Neil Powell
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 Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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