An engaging, illuminating biography of a captivating figure.
For his first four decades, Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) strived for success as a printer, publisher, and journalist.
Franklin’s fame as a statesman and scientist, based on his achievements in the last half of his life, far overshadows his early business career in London and Philadelphia. Bunker (An Empire on the Edge: How Britain Came to Fight America, 2014, etc.), a former reporter for the Financial Times and an award-winning historian, creates a vibrant, perspicacious, and well-researched portrait of a man hungry for knowledge and ambitious for financial success. Unhappy as an apprentice to a candle and soap maker in Boston, the adolescent Franklin became an assistant to his brother, a printer, which at least put him in proximity to words and ideas. A printer’s boy by day, he became a “scholar” at night, devouring books he borrowed from a local bookstore. In addition to Milton, Pope, and Socrates, Franklin read with delight Joseph Addison’s daily publication The Spectator, rewriting items to teach himself style. Soon, the “scandalous ideas about God and the cosmos” that Franklin gleaned from his readings “opened a rift between the boy and his family,” never to be healed. When Franklin “put the Christian God to the test of dialectic,” God failed. No wonder Franklin escaped from Boston to more open-minded Philadelphia, where he found work with a printer. Inexperienced and somewhat credulous, he sometimes “tipped headlong into adult situations he was too naive to comprehend.” In the 1720s, he decided to launch himself in London, a teeming, squalid city aptly captured by William Hogarth. Leaving Philadelphia, Franklin broke off a relationship with Deborah Read. Married and abandoned by the time Franklin returned, she became his common-law wife, raising his illegitimate son (the child of a relationship that Franklin kept secret for the rest of his life) along with their own children. Bunker adroitly describes Franklin’s involvement in the religious and political controversies of the day, including slavery, as well as in the scientific projects for which he became renowned.
An engaging, illuminating biography of a captivating figure.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-101-87441-7
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 27, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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