An expert but dense research study of a giant of modern science.
The first of a two-volume scholarly biography of Franz Boas (1858-1942), the father of American anthropology.
Zumwalt (American Folklore Scholarship: A Dialogue of Dissent, 1995, etc.), dean emerita at Agnes Scott College, ends this work in 1906, when Boas resigned from New York’s American Museum of Natural History to concentrate on teaching at Columbia. Born in Germany, Boas was fiercely ambitious and fascinated by science from childhood. Despite a doctorate in physics, he took up geography and spent a year studying the Inuit in northern Canada. This began a lifelong interest in non-Western cultures, which included trips to study First Nations peoples in the Pacific Northwest. Dissatisfied with limited opportunities in Germany, he settled permanently in America in 1887. Although quickly recognized, he spent years searching for a steady job, serving as an editor of the journal Science, organizer of the massive ethnology exhibit at Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exhibition, and, during an abortive period, head of anthropology at the newly founded Clark College. Financial security came with his appointment as a curator in the American Museum of Natural History in 1896. In 1899, he was named a professor at Columbia, after which his writing and the generation he taught converted anthropology from its clunky, racist origins into a modern scientific discipline. This is a work of academic research, not a popular biography. Readers who doubt that Zumwalt has read every letter, diary, and field note of Boas and his circle will quickly discover their error because her narrative technique is to make a point and then illustrate it with an excerpt from a document. Readers who begin each paragraph and then—upon encountering the first quotation mark—skip to the next will miss little. Nonspecialists will find Charles King’s Gods of the Upper Air far more accessible.
An expert but dense research study of a giant of modern science.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4962-1554-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Aug. 25, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
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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