An admirable if not always compelling exploration of a once-sensational murder and trial that recall our recent obsession with the Simpson case. Cohen (History/Univ. of Calif., Santa Barbara) begins with the discovery of the body of 23-year-old Jewett in a New York brothel fire set to reduce her hatcheted remains to rubble. Cohen’s massive research reveals that the woman known as Helen Jewett was a onetime Maine servant girl named Dorcas Doyen, placed from youth in the service of a prominent judge’s family. By age 19, Dorcas had left Maine and was an experienced “girl on the town,” part of a bustling, “not illegal” trade engaging, by one —alarmist estimate,— as many as one in seven women in 1830s New York. Between assignations, Jewett romanced partners through letters, some of which (quoted in the book’s most engaging chapter) were written to her killer. Richard Robinson, an innocent-looking New York clerk of good breeding who confided to his diary his irresistibility to women and maniacal leanings, was that partner. For several months they romanced; his infidelity ended the affair. Shortly afterward, Jewett was killed. Police retrieved evidence and arrested Robinson. But during the trial, Robinson’s top-flight lawyers savaged Jewett’s character, impugned prosecution witnesses, established a tight-enough alibi, and posited a theory of the “true” killer. Robinson was acquitted, years of press uproar ensued over the travesty of “the great unhung,” and Robinson’s lawyer gained “imperishable celebrity and never-dying fame.” Would that the book were as exciting as the story. But it isn—t, partly because of Cohen’s academic style, in which context impedes narrative, and partly because the author’s clear, well-organized prose informs but doesn—t transport. Enlivened by epistolary amours and detective-like research revelations, yet still a sluggish rendition of a resonant tale. (16 pages b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 11, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-41291-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1998
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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