A splendid account, highly recommended to all readers interested in early American history, women’s studies, or the history...
An elegantly written life of the enigmatic and powerfully charismatic Shaker prophet.
The image most have of the people called Shakers is compounded of an aesthetic appreciation of their elegantly austere furniture, distinctive architecture, and the music of their dancing (as remade by Aaron Copland and others), along with a respect for the integrity of their experiment in communal living, and a puzzlement at the evident attraction of their celibate discipline. It’s a view drawn for the most part from the later-developed Shakerism of the 19th century, organized in small communities from Maine to Indiana. But the Shakerism that came to America in the days of the Revolution was quite a different thing, largely the creation of a blacksmith’s daughter named Ann Lee. Her remarkable achievement was to transform the enthusiastic Quakerism she had adopted in preindustrial Manchester into a strange and compelling vision of God’s new dispensation—a new Christianity—with herself joining Jesus at its center as a mediator of grace. Novelist Francis (Taking Apart the Poco Poco, 1995) provides a full (the first full biography ever written, in fact), faithful, and immensely enjoyable account of the vicissitudes of Mother Ann and her disciples as they take the Shaker gospel from upstate New York to New England, meeting resistance and escalating violence along the way. The religious landscape of backwoods New England—a roiling mix of orthodox Calvinists, Baptists, Seekers, Perfectionists, New Light revivalists, and others—is vividly rendered, as is the unique personality of Mother Ann herself. The wife of a blacksmith, Ann lost all four of her children in infancy. Putting her Shakers in the place of her lost children, and Jesus in her estranged husband’s stead, she created a remythologized Christianity that found a feminine dimension in the Godhead itself and replaced sexual ecstasy with dervish-like ecstatic dancing and speaking in tongues. Francis is sensitive to the psychosocial dynamics of Shaker leaders and followers alike, as well as to the small tragedies of broken lives and broken families that created both converts and violent enemies of the Shaker faith.
A splendid account, highly recommended to all readers interested in early American history, women’s studies, or the history of religion.Pub Date: May 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-55970-562-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2001
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
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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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