Schaeffer (English/Brooklyn Coll.) is an unlucky fellow. Not only is the Marquis de Sade’s life already thoroughly published, no fewer than two North American writers have brought out major biographies in the last few months. When one comes to such a topic so late, it is customary to stake out some special perspective, aspect, or agenda. In November of last year Francine du Plessix Gray crossed the finish line first with her excellent At Home with the Marquis de Sade. In it she emphasizes Sade’s married life and domestic arrangements. Then in December a sober-minded Canadian scholar of French literature, Laurence Bongie, offered a full-scale assault against sadolatry in his fine Sade: A Biographical Essay; Bongie sees it as his mission to deflate the odious Sade’s overblown prestige. And just when we thought enough of Sade was enough, we get Schaeffer’s version of the life. Disappointingly, it does not markedly differ from any of the other lives that you might care to pick up and read. Schaeffer has not bothered to make a distinctive argument about Sade or his writing. Orthodox Freudian explanations resolve Sade’s perversions, and Schaeffer blandly accepts Sade as the major writer that many modernists proclaimed. Though Schaeffer does not state his views with great clarity, he gives the impression that Sade’s greatness resides in his unblinking gaze at the worst to be found in us. Freud also underpins Schaeffer’s reading of Sade’s appeal (if that is the right word): “Since sexual perversity is a common feature of everyone’s mental life . . . there is in every reader extremely powerful motives to respond to Sade’s imagination on this subject—whether through identification, laughter, titillation, horror, anger, or disgusted rejection.” The logic of this thought might not stand up under severe scrutiny, but we get the idea that Sade, like other great writers, is universal. This life of Sade is a respectable biography, but not likely to stand out in the crowd.
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-679-40407-4
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1999
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
