Clapp, who was Bruce Chatwin's dedicated editor at the British publisher Jonathan Cape, offers a delightful remembrance of the celebrated travel writer and novelist, drawing on her own experiences and on those of his closest friends. Blond, bright-eyed, beautiful, and brilliant: Chatwin exuded a mystique (amplified by his own self-mythifying tales) that captivated almost everyone who met him—as well as those who only read his books. Even a Welsh barmaid, observing his ``theatrical way,'' said that if he ``had been born in the twelfth century, he would have been a wizard.'' Clapp wonderfully captures the ebullient conversationalist with an impeccable eye for works of art (in his 20s he was a rapidly rising star at Sotheby's) and a taste for immaculate spareness in his surroundings. Many of the facts here will be known to readers of Chatwin's books and collected essays, but Clapp adds much in the way of frank discussion of his bisexuality, along with the impenetrable mystery of his long marriage, and his sad deterioration and death from AIDS in 1989. Along the way, she charts his development as a writer, relating how she worked with him to carve out the slender, elegant In Patagonia from an unwieldy manuscript; how his novel On the Black Hill drew on experiences from his own childhood and on people and places he visited in Wales; how The Songlines finally freed him from his obsessive need to write about nomadism as the central human experience and allowed him to write his final work, Utz; and how that work showed a radical change in a man who had always shunned the accumulation of things and, facing death, became obsessed with the idea of collecting. (Not idealizing her subject, she also honestly analyzes the flaws she finds in his writings.) ``There was always a thin line between Bruce being brilliant and Bruce being batty,'' Clapp notes affectionately. This tribute captures both sides with grace and charm—a must-read for all his fans.
Pub Date: Aug. 7, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-41033-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1997
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
