A worthwhile read, but expect nothing new on this saint.
A biography of St. Catherine of Siena (1347-1380).
Huffington Post senior editor Emling (Marie Curie and Her Daughters: The Private Lives of Science’s First Family, 2012, etc.) offers an interesting and readable, though otherwise unremarkable, biography of St. Catherine, who entered the world in a time of violence, plague, and religious unrest. From her earliest years, Catherine showed an uncanny piety and devotion to her faith and to the established Catholic Church. She had her first vision of Christ at age 6, committed herself to a vow of virginity at age 7, and was regularly fasting soon after. Her life of 33 years would be marked by extreme self-denial—she often existed only on the Eucharist—and almost pathological desires for physical suffering and martyrdom. While barely in her 20s, Catherine jumped fully into the church politics of her day, encouraging the pope to vacate Avignon, France, and return to Rome and encouraging a crusade against Islam. Unfortunately, Emling does not confront the rather obvious question of how an uneducated woman in a thoroughly patriarchal world managed to address the political issues of her day and even win the admiration and devotion of popes and other leaders. Catherine managed to do the seemingly impossible in the course of only a few years, and yet the author presents her remarkable influence without asking how it occurred. Similarly, Emling’s portrayal of Catherine is entirely uncritical, even to the point of being fawning. The author fails to pose obvious questions about Catherine’s mental health and the veracity of contemporary sources. There is no doubt that general readers will find the book fascinating in many ways: Catherine lived a remarkable life and left an interesting story. However, Emling relies on the work of prior writers and offers little new in terms of either original research or unique approach.
A worthwhile read, but expect nothing new on this saint.Pub Date: April 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-137-27980-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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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