Mourning may become Electra, but it served equally well for O’Neill, who, as Black (English/Simon Fraser Univ.) contends in this massive biography, worked through his personal tragedies by recasting them for the stage. Beginning before O’Neill’s birth, Black adumbrates the troubles of the young marrieds who brought the playwright into this harsh world and then delineates the misfortunes which struck O’Neill at an early age. After he survived the problems of a morphine-addicted mother and schoolyard politics, the adversities of childhood gave way to traumas of adulthood. Death overshadowed O’Neill’s life: Within a period of six years, he witnessed the death of five friends (three of whom committed suicide). Within three years of his first Broadway success, O’Neill’s entire family—mother Ella, father James, and brother Jamie—died. A scandalous divorce and subsequent remarriage offered little respite from his turbulent life and times, and physical affliction in the form of muscle tremors tormented him in later life. Through subtle readings of O’Neill’s plays and extensive research into his life and letters, Black explores how these monstrous losses ravaged O’Neill’s psyche and how the playwright’s mourning perversely inspired his creative processes. Black’s structure sometimes groans even more loudly than his hero, as diagnoses are swept in to stand alone rather than woven into the thread of the narrative, and pedantic explanations of such common terms as “separation anxiety,— better buried in footnotes, disrupt the biographical flow. Despite such minor flaws, however, the writing at its best is as straightforward as it is informative, presenting O—Neill’s sadly heroic tale with welcome grace. Though completing this massive tome may require several long days’ journeys into night at the library, the destination is more than adequate recompense. O’Neill proves a fascinating, if morbid, traveling companion, and Black a capable and erudite cicerone. (40 illus.)
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-300-07676-2
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1999
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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