Appropriately complex biography, deftly maintaining a balance of sophistication and explication.
A dense, comprehensive survey of the events in Gandhi’s life, tracing his metamorphosis from pampered child of privilege to “great soul.”
Galvanized by India's recent embrace of nuclear weaponry, so contrary to Gandhi’s teachings, Wolpert (Nehru, 1996) has set out to trace the life of this nonviolent visionary. He cogently illustrates how circumstances transformed ambitious, principled Mohandas Gandhi, son of the prime minister of a princely Indian state, into a Mahatma (an Indian term for “great soul”) who renounced all material and sensual pleasures. Beginning with Gandhi’s unlooked-for awakening in London (where he was much impressed by British traditions of law and equality), and continuing through the coalescing of his activist bent in South Africa, Wolpert quotes extensively from Gandhi’s books, articles, and letters, all of which provide a good deal of insight into his motivations. Yet a biographer can only go so far in explaining the political genius that, coupled with intense fortitude and resolve, enabled Gandhi to devise so many methods of nonviolent resistance. Something indefinable drove him to action wherever he perceived injustice—from taxes imposed on the Indian community in the Transvaal to the plight of indigo-farming peasants in India to the British occupation of the subcontinent itself (and its subsequent bloody division into the two nations of India and Pakistan). Gandhi was still working for peace, begging Hindus and Muslims to stop the massacres, when he was assassinated in 1948. Although Wolpert’s admiration for his subject is so fervent as to be occasionally distracting, this is on balance a clear-eyed chronicle of an exemplary life.
Appropriately complex biography, deftly maintaining a balance of sophistication and explication.Pub Date: April 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-19-513060-X
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2001
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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