Densely detailed and sometimes slow going, but sheds a fresh light on many aspects of Whitman’s life and career.
The poet’s relationship with his brothers, one of whom saw heavy fighting during the Civil War.
Novelist and journalist Roper (Fatal Mountaineer, 2002, etc.) takes an inside look into the Whitman family with a special focus on the war years, when Walt’s younger brother George served with the 51st New York Volunteers. The book opens with a glimpse at the family’s early life, when Walt Sr. worked as a house carpenter, building homes that the family would live in while he found a buyer. Much of that time was spent in Brooklyn, where his widow Louisa continued to live during the war. The 51st fought in 21 battles, including Antietam, Fredericksburg and the Wilderness, so the family was constantly worried about George’s welfare. His brother’s involvement was at least part of the reason Walt spent much of the war in the nation’s capital tending to wounded Union soldiers. Another reason, Roper argues, was his attraction to the young men, some of whom may well have become his sexual partners. The author buttresses his argument by reproducing lists of men’s names Whitman compiled at several points in his life and quoting from the letters the poet wrote to some of the soldiers. George rose through the ranks to become captain of his company, and the family’s concern for him was always paramount. Roper quotes extensively from letters sent back and forth; some of the correspondence between the poet and his mother provides a refreshingly unvarnished view of Walt’s character. The account of George’s career, sometimes in the words of his own letters, reveals his casual bravery and lack of military ambition. His capture and imprisonment (with most of his unit) gave Walt a burning cause in the latter days of the war: fighting Grant’s policy of refusing to exchange Confederate captives until the South released the black Union soldiers it had captured.
Densely detailed and sometimes slow going, but sheds a fresh light on many aspects of Whitman’s life and career.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-8027-1553-1
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Walker
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2008
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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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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