A profusion of artful letters, the greater part from the mellifluous pen of Carson, detailing everyday life while writing The Edge of the Sea and Silent Spring. It's a wonder that Carson ever had a spare moment to churn out her books, considering the sheer tonnage of letters she produced and the obvious care and attention that went into every one. The letters from Freeman — Carson's Maine coast neighbor — can also be a pleasure, with their descriptive energy (editor Martha Freeman is her daughter), but the bulk are Carson's, and there lies the main interest. Carson's letters are deeply personal, and access to them has the quality of secretly sharing an intimate conversation floating over from a nearby café table: "... always the sense of your presence, and your sweet tenderness, and love was very real to me." There are forays into nature writing, with much birding and poking around tidal pools; and — this is the correspondence of two friends, after all — there's talk of furniture and clothes, hair styles and manicures. Carson, not surprisingly, is most compelling when expressing how she feels about her writing: her fears concerning its quality; the frustrations and satisfactions of research; the joys of having William Shawn tell her that the first draft of Silent Spring (which was serialized in the New Yorker) was "a brilliant achievement...full of beauty and loveliness and depth of feeling." Medical problems plagued both the Carson and Freeman families; Carson's later letters are riddled with one bit of bad news after the next, from rheumatoid arthritis to iriditis, to metastasized cancer. Yet her gradual decline is related so sparingly and with such mettle, it is overpowering. Darting, fresh, sensuous, pleasingly elliptical at times, these letters also serve to tether the increasingly deified Carson firmly to earth — just where she'd want to be.
Pub Date: March 20, 1995
ISBN: 0807070114
Page Count: 608
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1995
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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