An informed and sympathetic portrait of a troubled mind and humble heart. (32 illustrations, not seen)
Another deft portrait (see The Devil Kissed Her, p. 680) of the woman who murdered her mother and later joined with better-known brother Charles to write Tales from Shakespeare.
Hitchcock (Coming About, 1998, etc.) dives into a deep and rich sea teeming with literary life. Problem is, though, that once you begin writing about the Lambs, well, here come Coleridge (their dear friend) and Wordsworth and Hazlitt and Godwin and Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley. And once you mention Claire Clairmont (as the author does), then lubricious Lord Byron also swims among this vast school of Romantics, all of whom seem to have corresponded with one another, many of whom kept diaries. How to keep the focus on talented and mad—if often demure—Mary Lamb (1764–1847), with all these other fascinating creatures splashing nearby, clamoring for attention? Hitchcock manages quite well. Although she takes numerous glances elsewhere (how can she not?), she proceeds in steady, professional fashion to tell Mary’s story, revealing a knowledge of the major biographies of the principal Romantics and of the correspondence and writings of Charles and Mary. She imagines a rather sensational reenactment of the murder—a flash of a knife in the Lambs’ kitchen in 1796, excused by a coroner’s inquest as an act of patent lunacy. After time in a madhouse, Mary eventually joined her brother Charles for what would be the rest of their lives. Born into the servant class, the Lambs rose into the middle class by virtue of their pens (and Charles’s reliable labors for the East India House), finding their niche in a circle that included most of the literary luminaries of the age. Mary periodically returned to the madhouse for weeks and months, slipping into virtually permanent twilight after her brother’s death in 1834. Hitchcock persuades us that she was a major contributor to the Lambs’ literary creations.
An informed and sympathetic portrait of a troubled mind and humble heart. (32 illustrations, not seen)Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-393-05741-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
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.
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
