Enthusiastic biography of wildly successful evangelist Sunday (1863-1935), by Bruns (The Damndest Radical, 1986; Knights of the Road, 1980). This is a pre-Freudian version of what must have been at least a fairly complex life, including severe poverty, loss of a father, an alcoholic stepfather, a mother-fixation, and several kinds of salvation. The combative Sunday (``Billy'' to Bruns) was saved from poverty by athletic talent and became a good-field, no-hit outfielder for the Chicago White Stockings; socially, he saved himself by marrying into the upper middle class. When his soul was saved, he became the most remarkable preacher of his day—a ``frothing, howling huckster'' in Emma Goldman's words—tireless, violent, and charismatic, ranting, leaping about, breaking chairs, staging imaginary fistfights with the devil. Bruns's Sunday is a Horatio Alger character who frequented bars apparently without drinking to excess, and red-light districts without doing much of anything. A kid who ran around with the notorious King Kelly (style-setter for Babe Ruth) had to experience something, but what it was is not revealed here—and so missing from the core of this whitewashed account is a classic ingredient of conversion: the ascent from evil ways. Not that research is stinted in other areas; there is a great deal on the White Stockings and Sunday's subsequent athletic career, including his reaction to a player's strike: he was a scab. The tone is saccharine (``at prayer meetings he always positioned himself so he could keep one eye on [fiancÇe] Nell and one on the preacher''), and the reader's believability suffers. Interesting turn-of-the-century Americana, though offering no glimpse of the real Sunday—his life, marriage, relationships—but only uncritical images of a frontier-style poor-boy who preached and made money until called out by the Great Umpire by way of a heart attack. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: May 18, 1992
ISBN: 0-393-03088-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1992
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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