by Patricia Brady ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 27, 2005
Engaging study of a vibrant woman.
In a short, admirable biography, Brady—who has edited several books about Nelly Custis Lewis, Martha Washington’s granddaughter—recreates the life and loves of America’s original first lady.
George Washington was not Martha’s first husband. At 18, Martha—or Patsy, as friends and family often called her—married Daniel Custis, an older man from New Kent County who deeply loved Martha, and took her as his bride despite his father’s controlling opposition. She came into a huge estate when Custis died, and proved an efficient and decisive businesswoman. The dashing George Washington then courted the young widow, though surviving letters reveal that he was deeply infatuated with another woman, Sally Cary Fairfax. Still, Brady is at pains to insist that George felt some affection or esteem for Martha, that he didn’t marry her just for her money. Whatever the case, Martha was certainly smitten with George, and, Brady writes, the pair grew into a deeper love over the course of their marriage. Martha would recall the years at Mount Vernon before the Revolution as the couple’s “golden years.” But politics intervened. During the pre-Revolutionary boycotts of British goods, Martha had to scramble to make sure her household had sufficient windowpanes and cloth. Then came the war, and a whirlwind political career. She found being first lady somewhat tedious—she disliked having to fuss constantly over her hair and clothes. Still, she did much to shape the office, insisting that she was a hostess and a public servant, not a queen. Brady offers a fascinating discussion of the ways Washington’s biographers have caricatured Martha—creating, for example, a “timid” wife who wouldn’t risk overshadowing her husband. Brady corrects that picture without going too much toward the other extreme. Her Martha is not a protofeminist, and she doesn’t attempt to cover up her subject’s warts (she is quite frank, for example about Martha’s failure to share her husband’s “certainty that slavery was wrong”).
Engaging study of a vibrant woman.Pub Date: June 27, 2005
ISBN: 0-670-03430-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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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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 ; edited by Alan Rosen
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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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