by René Weis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2007
A sure-to-be controversial bio-historical feast: Shakespeareans will devour it.
Massive biography of the Bard creates as many myths as it debunks.
Any who harbor doubts as to creativity’s vital role in scholarly work need look no further than here. Weis (English/University College, London; The Yellow Cross: The Story of the Last Cathars, 2001, etc.) uncorks great casks of knowledge about Elizabethan England and Shakespeare’s oeuvre to animate the Bard’s rich life and times. To reconstruct—some would say, construct—this life about which so little is known, he sets biographical criticism on its ear by attempting to exhume otherwise hidden events in Shakespeare’s life from his work, while simultaneously using known historical occurrences to inform critical readings of the texts. “The plays and poems contain important clues to Shakespeare’s inner life and to real, tangible, external events he experienced,” Weis writes. “There is a cumulative amount of circumstantial evidence that demonstrates beyond doubt that Shakespeare responded in his work to key events of his life….to disembody the plays and poems from the life of their author is as counterintuitive as seeking to separate him from the national history of his era.” The author’s impassioned investigations lead him to advance all kinds of qualified theories, often preceded by the words ‘might,’ ‘may have,’ ‘probably,’ ‘almost certainly,’ ‘must have,’ etc. For instance: The sonnets’ fair youth, dark lady and rival poet were, respectively, Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton; Emilia Bassano, daughter of a court musician; and Christopher Marlowe, with whom Shakespeare may have had a physical relationship. Also: The glover’s son from Stratford was a poacher, father of dramatist William Davenant and, perhaps most intriguingly, lame. (The possible causes of his limp occupy nearly an entire chapter.) Alongside these speculative conclusions, Weis provides engaging historical commentary on the period.
A sure-to-be controversial bio-historical feast: Shakespeareans will devour it.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-8050-7501-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: John Macrae/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2007
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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