A touching read, with a fictional character to admire.
A moving, complex and well-crafted fictional biography uses pivotal historic events of the 20th century as its venue.
Henry Brown is the last of three sons born in London in 1901 to Leopold and Charlotte Brown, a wealthy Anglo-Jewish family. Orphaned at 18, Leopold is bestowed a hefty inheritance, but lacking drive and ambition, he accomplishes little with it. Wanting his three sons to acquire a better education and achieve more, he and Charlotte hire governesses to teach the boys art, music and language. They are raised in a structured and orderly Edwardian environment, but contrary to the popular method of child rearing of the era, the boys spend much time with their parents, living happily in their grand home in London as well as in their country home in Wycombe. Life is good–until 1914 when England is pulled into World War I, and Henry’s brothers are claimed as victims. Their deaths prove to be the trigger point for the demise of Henry’s parents’ marriage, with Charlotte becoming absorbed by important political and charitable work and Leopold eventually drinking himself to death. Apprehensive of following in his brothers’ footsteps into the army, Henry opts for military school. Capable, intelligent and multilingual, Henry is appointed an attaché to the Viceroy of India, the first of many political positions he will serve. He meets and falls in love with Henrietta, the daughter of wealthy and staunch anti-Semitic parents, and their marriage is a contented one–she soon gives birth to a son and daughter. But a mission in Berlin leads to a tragic and pivotal moment in his life. Henrietta, who thrives on attending lavish galas with socialites, is swept up in the rising popularity of the Führer and becomes a strong proponent of Nazi ideology. For a while, Henry tolerates her anti-Semitism until he sees that their children are next to be indoctrinated. The complex political and cultural situations are skillfully managed and Maitland-Lewis renders the multitudinous cast of characters with marvelous detail. Only some instances of improbable dialogue interrupt the easy flow.
A touching read, with a fictional character to admire.Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2004
ISBN: 978-1-413-414295
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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