Although Collins doesn’t provide much new information, the clean, crisp narrative presents the puzzling Poe as a deeply...
The author of investigative books about literary and historical figures returns with a lean, swift life of the puzzling Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), whose life and death are as full of mystery as his famous tales.
Part of the publisher’s Icons series, Collins’ (English/Portland State Univ.; Duel with the Devil: The True Story of How Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr Teamed Up to Take on America's First Sensational Murder Mystery, 2013, etc.) work adheres to the facts of Poe’s life and doesn’t even speculate much about Poe’s puzzling death—what was he doing in Baltimore? Why was he in the degraded condition he was in?—and avoids even commenting on some of the more bizarre conspiracy/murder theories (see John Evangelist Walsh’s Midnight Dreary, 2000). Collins begins with what, until recently, had been a tradition at the Baltimore cemetery where Poe’s remains lie: a midnight visitor on his birthday. Then the author proceeds quickly and chronologically through Poe’s life—the early death of his mother (and his father’s abandonment), his unofficial adoption by the Allans (cranky John Allan, a wealthy man, ignored Poe in his will), his boyhood years in England, his schooling (including the University of Virginia and West Point; he didn’t finish at either place), his early struggles as a writer, his battles with booze, his marriage to his 13-year-old first cousin Virginia Clemm and, of course, the composition of his famous works. Collins identifies some favorites: “Ligeia,”the three tales of ratiocination with detective C. Auguste Dupin (the forefather of Sherlock Holmes), the failed novels (one finished, one not) and “The Raven.” Collins also examines Poe’s quick trigger—he accused the puzzled and popular Longfellow of plagiarism. The author also praises Poe’s late works and spends some time on Poe’s reputation.
Although Collins doesn’t provide much new information, the clean, crisp narrative presents the puzzling Poe as a deeply troubled and toweringly talented artist.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-26187-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2014
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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