by Stephen J. May ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2000
A fine job: May’s attentions may well inspire new interest in Grey’s largely forgotten work.
A well-crafted biography of the western writer.
Grey (1872–1939) made his considerable fortune on sturdy tales of the Wild West, tales with an uncomplicated vision of right and wrong, truth and falsehood. Continuing the study he began with Zane Grey (1997), literary scholar May reveals that Grey’s own life was considerably more tangled. From the Mormons (whom he portrayed as villains in Riders of the Purple Sage), he acquired a hankering to take up polygamy—a notion that his ever-tolerant wife Dolly finally quashed. From tales of boyhood heroes, like Daniel Boone, he nurtured a profound wanderlust, and he was given to leaving Dolly to manage his business affairs while he wandered off to sail the South Seas or fish the streams of Alaska—and spending so much on his adventures that he came close to bankruptcy more than once. More positively, writes May, Grey was an outdoorsman and athlete par excellence, a “freshwater fisherman, baseball pitcher, explorer, nature lover, sailor, adventurer, [and] saltwater angler,” to say nothing of an extraordinarily prolific and competent writer. For many years, like his hero Theodore Roosevelt, he filled the role of the macho man of letters, a role that would be usurped by Grey’s later contemporary Ernest Hemingway. (Hemingway, the author reveals, rebuffed Grey’s repeated invitations to go deep-sea fishing, fearing “that Grey might take the opportunity to cash in on Hemingway’s popularity.”) Though he is best known for his Western novels, May suggests that Grey deserves critical recognition as an outstanding interpreter of the outdoors and as something of a proto-environmentalist, instead of being shelved as a minor genre writer. His argument in this regard is entirely convincing, backed with ample quotations from Grey’s published writings and unpublished journals.
A fine job: May’s attentions may well inspire new interest in Grey’s largely forgotten work.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-8214-1316-3
Page Count: 292
Publisher: Ohio Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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