An unconvincing, if energetic, plea for giving robber barons the benefit of realpolitik.
One historian’s nomination of England’s John of Gaunt (1340–99), Duke of Lancaster and father of King Henry IV, as both chivalry’s last great practitioner and direct progenitor of the likes of Donald Trump.
Cantor (Emeritus, History and Sociology/NYU; Antiquity, 2003, etc.) amply documents the Duke’s qualifications: in rough priority order, connected powerbroker, warrior, proto-capitalist, and heterosexual (unlike nephew King Richard II). Yet it seems to take an inordinate amount of backtracking and reemphasis to wedge Gaunt satisfactorily into the selected symbolic role. This is not biography, but rather a picky academic argument as to why Gaunt’s life can be said to bring the medieval period to its close. Annual rents alone, controlled by Gaunt’s immediate Plantagenet family, apart from sundry bribes, tributes, and ransoms extracted under force of arms, would have made him, Cantor estimates, a billionaire (in today’s money) five times over. He patronized John Wyclif in cultivating the seeds of Reformation a century before its time, then dumped him on the brink; he likewise sponsored Geoffrey Chaucer, a relative by marriage, to the point where his output also began to sound a little radical to peers of Gaunt’s mindset, then backed off. He also loyally abstained from a throne grab when it might well have been his. But when Cantor runs out of undocumented assertions that Gaunt was unusually considerate—that is, “chivalrous”—toward all his mistresses but “never used a condom” (animal-based products were in fact available) it sounds more than a little like historical press agentry. Cantor’s interesting defense of the African slave trade as hypothetically posed by its instigator, Prince Henry (the Navigator) of Portugal, who was Gaunt’s grandson by his second marriage, also has stretch marks.
An unconvincing, if energetic, plea for giving robber barons the benefit of realpolitik.Pub Date: June 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-2688-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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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