A swarming and copious selection of letters by the Nobel Prizewinning novelist and playwright. ``My life is a series of blunders and recoveries and so it will be, I expect, till the end.'' Described by his biographer Marr (Patrick White: A Life, 1992) as ``a wise man who could be stubbornly wrong,'' White (191290) acquired the epistolary habit at age four or five, never to abandon it for long. His letters, by turns irascible and fond, cover a broad range of correspondents: from friends of his youth to literary people like Christina Stead and Shirley Hazzard to public figures like Ronald Reagan; White scathingly dismissed the president's Chinese diplomacy, savaged the American taste for ``celluloid, plastic, and decadence,'' and urged Reagan to ``[drop] out from time to time to contemplate problems which seem insoluble. Probably they will remain so.'' White wanted his friends to destroy the letters they received, but it's fortunate that not all complied with his wishes, for the fullness of this inadvertent self-portrait is nearly Shakespearean. The bluntness and sporadic cruelty of White mingles with a bold and outsize warmth that give the letters an epic feel without the usual affectations of the epic. His maverick, embattled nature guided him, and the letters tingle with it as they chronicle his early wanderings, wartime service in the Middle East and Africa, lifelong partnership with onetime Greek soldier Manoly Lascaris, and pattern of friendships won and forsworn. His love-hate relations with Australia were perhaps emblematic of his character, but so was a blitheness that led him to send thanks in 1940 to an American boyfriend: ``That little G-string you presented me with last year is a great help in a New York heat wave!'' Marr offers useful commentary; drawings of the craggy-faced novelist also lend a charm to these pages. A literary milestone.
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-226-89503-3
Page Count: 678
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1996
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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