A mostly delightful love letter to a great city.
The ageless genre of city histories receives a fine addition.
Though London was the biggest city in the world in the 19th century, it does not even make the top 10 today. Jenkins, a lifelong Londoner who served as the editor of Evening Standard and the Times and is now a columnist at the Guardian, clearly loves his home city, and he leavens his enthusiasm with expertise and a highly critical eye. Beginning as Londinium, founded after the 43 C.E. Roman invasion, by the end of the century, it was a cosmopolitan city of 60,000. It nearly disappeared after Rome withdrew in 410 but pulled itself together after two centuries and prospered as a trading center, surviving the black plague and a civil war to become a European power by 1500. Henry VIII’s looting of the church produced vast wealth, and Elizabeth’s disinterest in aggressive wars did nothing to discourage London’s rise to “Europe’s premier financial centre.” Until he reaches the middle of the 17th century, Jenkins delivers traditional history, mixing politics, culture, and trade. City planning and architecture take a back seat because little that was built still exists. Thereafter, the author takes his love of the city literally by concentrating on city government, delving heavily into the backgrounds of neighborhoods, palaces, squares, monuments, roads, and infrastructure. Londoners and frequent visitors will relish his expert, opinionated, and sometimes highly unflattering picture. While many European cities that rebuilt after World War II carefully preserved their historical gems, Britain did no such thing, giving builders carte blanche. As a result, “they inflicted greater destruction on London…than all Hitler’s bombs.” Readers unfamiliar with the city’s geography will appreciate the generous maps and illustrations but may feel the urge to skim many detailed accounts of local property development.
A mostly delightful love letter to a great city.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-64313-552-6
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Pegasus
Review Posted Online: May 25, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
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.
Atlanticsenior 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 Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist (1900–45) collected his work from WWII in two bestselling volumes, this second published in 1944, a year before Pyle was killed by a sniper’s bullet on Okinawa. In his fine introduction to this new edition, G. Kurt Piehler (History/Univ. of Tennessee at Knoxville) celebrates Pyle’s “dense, descriptive style” and his unusual feel for the quotidian GI experience—a personal and human side to war left out of reporting on generals and their strategies. Though Piehler’s reminder about wartime censorship seems beside the point, his biographical context—Pyle was escaping a troubled marriage—is valuable. Kirkus, at the time, noted the hoopla over Pyle (Pulitzer, hugely popular syndicated column, BOMC hype) and decided it was all worth it: “the book doesn’t let the reader down.” Pyle, of course, captures “the human qualities” of men in combat, but he also provides “an extraordinary sense of the scope of the European war fronts, the variety of services involved, the men and their officers.” Despite Piehler’s current argument that Pyle ignored much of the war (particularly the seamier stuff), Kirkus in 1944 marveled at how much he was able to cover. Back then, we thought, “here’s a book that needs no selling.” Nowadays, a firm push might be needed to renew interest in this classic of modern journalism.
Pub Date: April 26, 2001
ISBN: 0-8032-8768-2
Page Count: 513
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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