A comprehensive and moving portrait of a resurrected American icon.
A biography explores the life and work of the poet Phillis Wheatley.
Too long ignored by scholars of American poetry, Wheatley’s oeuvre is finally regarded as an indispensable part of the national heritage. It provides a glimpse into the birth of African- American literature, American women’s literature, and America itself. Using Wheatley’s poetry and other primary sources from the 18th century—including some that have only recently been rediscovered—Kigel argues for the exceptional place Wheatley inhabits in American letters. Arriving in Boston as a slave—“She could not have been more than seven years old”—in 1761, she was purchased by the wealthy Wheatley family and named Phillis after the ship that brought her across the middle passage. After receiving an unprecedented education by the Wheatleys’ daughter, Mary, Phillis started writing poetry, publishing her first book at 20 and thereby becoming a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic. Celebrating George Washington and the Revolutionary cause in her verses, Wheatley was, as Kigel argues, the de facto poet laureate of the war, serving as both a champion and the embodiment of the humanistic values that would become the basis of the American identity. With a foreword in verse by Nikki Giovanni, the book deftly blends poetry, biography, and criticism to argue for Wheatley’s pre-eminence in the American literary pantheon. Kigel (Becoming Abraham Lincoln, 2017, etc.) writes in a literary prose that summons the drama of Wheatley’s life in novelistic detail: “Like the others, she had been taken from home and family, crammed into a pit of unimaginable squalor, and left to languish there, sickened by the stench of disease and death, lonely, terrified, and utterly deprived of any human comfort.” While his treatment of his subject often borders on the hagiographic, Wheatley is one of those figures whose stories are so utterly unlikely that it is difficult not to write of them with reverence. Thoroughly researched and delightfully readable, the stirring book makes a fine addition to the growing library of Wheatley studies.
A comprehensive and moving portrait of a resurrected American icon.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: -
Publisher: Paragon House
Review Posted Online: June 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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