The story of Mary Dyer, executed in 1660 in Boston for her Quaker beliefs, should be an instructive walk on the darker side of American democracy—but this treatment by debut author Plimpton reads more like one of those perky biographies inflicted on middle- schoolers for a social-studies project. In retelling Dyer's life, Plimpton relies a great deal on intuitive insight, because Dyer left only two pieces of writing- -letters to the Boston authorities. As a result, the author's presentation lacks the imaginative flair of a novel or the measured restraint of a serious biography. Moreover, it's flawed further by graceless, even arch, prose: ``conversation passed between them like a fresh gushing stream''; ``the inhabitants, predominantly deer, gazed in wonder at the big sails approaching.'' The facts of Dyer's life, such as they are, are all here: How Dyer and her husband arrived in 1635 in the Bay Colony in search of a new land and a freer way of worship, only to find that the Puritans had entrenched themselves with a government that was more a theocracy then a limited democracy. The Dyers prospered, but Mary—a woman of deep spirituality—soon grew dissatisfied with the rigid Puritan theology and its emphasis on male supremacy. A friendship with the charismatic Anne Hutchinson, who believed in a ``covenant of grace,'' led to the Dyers' expulsion from Boston to Rhode Island- -but it was Mary's meeting, while on a lengthy visit to England, with Quaker founder George Fox that radically changed her life. Fearful of anything that threatened its hegemony, the Boston establishment executed her for preaching her Quaker beliefs—an act that appalled King Charles II, who, through Royal Charter, secured religious tolerance in Rhode Island, though not in Boston, where the cruel treatment of Quakers continued. A second-rate rendering of a first-rate idea: the limit of popular tolerance in early American democracy as exemplified by the life and death of one courageous woman.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1994
ISBN: 0-8283-1964-2
Page Count: 246
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1993
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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