A study of Russia's great writer in his historical context, this conveys the stifling atmosphere of 19th-century tsarist Russia without illuminating Pushkin's literary genius. Alexander Pushkin (17991837) should be the ideal subject for a biography. His life, like his art, was colorful and dramatic, from his origins (his maternal great-grandfather was African-born), his excessive gambling (he temporarily lost a chapter of Evgenii Onegin at the gambling table), and womanizing to his early death at age 37 from a gunshot wound received in a duel. ``The Age of Pushkin'' was marked by seminal events in Russia's history: Napoleon's invasion and defeat, and the Decembrist Revolt of 1825, which ended in the death by hanging of five men, all close to Pushkin, and the exile to Siberia of over 100 others. The foremost shaper of the Russian language, Pushkin is revered as both a writer and national hero in a culture that intermingles the two categories more fully than most. Strangely, he has not received his due among English-speakers. Edmonds (Classics/Oxford Univ.; The Big Three, 1991) undertook his study, first, in an effort to remedy the situation. His second, rather odd intention was to save Pushkin from Soviet prudery and ideology. Edmonds is at his best in conveying the oppressiveness of tsarist suspicions, manifested in Pushkin's internal exile and the constant censorship of his work. But Russian history is blurred by the narrative's excess of ``watersheds'' and ``turning points.'' In addition, the reader easily tires of repeated descriptions of Pushkin's ``paradoxical character'' and the phony intimacy of trite phrasing. Had Edmonds been a better writer and delivered his message less as if to dense undergraduates, this might have been a more satisfying read. Still, to the reader looking for access to Pushkin and Russian history, this should provide an adequate point of entry.
Pub Date: Nov. 28, 1995
ISBN: 0-312-13593-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 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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