A fondly erudite look at a young, likable celebrity in the making.
A spirited account of the young Wilde’s inspiring 11-month tour of America.
Morris (Lighting Out for the Territory: How Samuel Clemens Headed West and Became Mark Twain, 2010, etc.) chronicles a year in the life of Irish dandy and belletrist Wilde, who, at age 27, was bent on invading America the way Dickens had a generation before. An Oxford graduate, poet, student of John Ruskin and Walter Pater, and enthusiastic and visible proponent of the aesthetic movement in England, Wilde was, by January 1882, when he arrived in New York, already famous, though few could say why. Wilde was a self-promoting genius, Morris writes, “created, cultivated and commodified,” like celebrities today. He hadn’t yet written his famous works or openly embraced gayness, but in his elaborate, precious outfits, sporting sunflowers and lilies, dropping affected bons mots for journalists to scoop up as he instructed American audiences with authority on “The Beautiful” and “The Artistic Character of the English Renaissance,” Wilde was challenging traditional notions of masculinity and also creating his celebrity. Morris goes step by step in this, drawing on Matthew Hofer and Gary Scharnhorst’s book of newspaper interviews Oscar Wilde in America (2010) for a record of his decidedly uneven reception, from rapturous audiences in New York, where Napoleon Sarony took his famous photographs of Wilde in various guises; to Chicago, where he insulted his Midwestern audience for their ugly waterworks; to Denver, San Francisco, the South and Canada. He met Walt Whitman, Ambrose Bierce, Jefferson Davis and Ulysses S. Grant and generated “verbal donnybrooks” all along the way. In the end, Wilde and America shared a mutual affection.
A fondly erudite look at a young, likable celebrity in the making.Pub Date: Jan. 7, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-674-06696-0
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Belknap/Harvard Univ.
Review Posted Online: Oct. 16, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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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