Nowhere near a cut-and-dried case, but plausible enough to leave readers—particularly those who found Peter Pan disquieting...
Adopting both the general notion and the melodramatic tone of D.H. Lawrence’s famous comment—“J.M. Barrie has a fatal touch for those he loves. They die”—Dudgeon (Our East End: Memories of Life in Disappearing Britain, 2008, etc.) presents the author of Peter Pan as a crippled soul who deliberately manipulated the lives and psyches of numerous associates and children.
Why? Not for sex—the author dismisses this notion out of hand—but in compensation for a childhood so “bereft of wonder” that he was left incapable of any genuine ability to love. How? Through hypnosis and autosuggestion, techniques inspired by Svengali, the villain in George Du Maurier’s novel Trilby. Who? Dudgeon trots in a large company over whom Barrie “extend[ed] his malign power,” including but not limited to the five “Lost Boys” of that same Du Maurier’s daughter Sylvia, his son Gerald Du Maurier, Gerald’s daughter Daphne and, for variety, the doomed explorer Robert Scott. All did indeed die young, commit suicide and/or suffer lifelong emotional problems. Furthermore, the author ups the body count by suggesting that Barrie played a hushed-up role in the accidental death of his older brother in childhood. The evidence for this, as for Dudgeon’s entire thesis, is at best circumstantial. Aside from sure proof, presented in a pair of photos, that Barrie altered Sylvia’s will to give him guardianship over the boys, it’s all based on suppositions, uneasy comments or dark hints by contemporaries, bald guesses and supposedly telling parallels between fleshly characters and those in either Barrie’s works or various of the Du Mauriers’ “autobiographical psycho-novels.”
Nowhere near a cut-and-dried case, but plausible enough to leave readers—particularly those who found Peter Pan disquieting (which it is)—wondering.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-60598-063-8
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
