by Thomas Bailey & Katherine Joslin ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 3, 2018
A fresh and perceptive analysis of Roosevelt’s contributions to literature.
The author of more than 35 books and 150,000 letters found time to be 26th president of the United States.
Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) was a prolific writer throughout his life, producing journals, accounts of his travels and adventures, essays, countless speeches, histories, and letters. As Bailey (Emeritus, English and Environmental Studies/Western Michigan Univ.) and Joslin (English/Western Michigan University; Edith Wharton and the Making of Fashion, 2009, etc.) argue persuasively, Roosevelt took enormous pride in being a writer, overseeing all aspects of publication, taking pains to hone a vigorous style, and never losing sight of his audience, nor of the image he wanted to convey. “In his opinion,” the authors write, “for him to be accurately seen and appraised by the world is to be seen and appraised as he wishes.” The authors clearly admire Roosevelt’s literary energies: during the year he served as governor of New York, he and his wife lived on his earnings as a writer of numerous magazine pieces and three books, including his famous military memoir, The Rough Riders. During his two terms as president, he published an astonishing five books. A voracious reader with “eidetic memory” as well as a tireless writer, Roosevelt was “our literary man in the White House.” Critics and fellow writers praised him: Walt Whitman, for one, admired Roosevelt’s Ranch Life and the Hunting-Trail for capturing the essential spirit of the “wild Western life” with “a little touch of the dude.” Offering close readings of many important works, the authors make a strong case for their assessment of Roosevelt’s “probing and controlled language” and the robust prose that reflected his spirited outlook. Even when “deeply saddened,” he acted “as though he were bursting with joy and optimism.” Not all of Roosevelt’s writing was successful: his autobiography, for example, with chapters farmed out to contributors; “self-aggrandizing” essays; and some late works, especially those stridently critical of Woodrow Wilson, which are marked by “shrillness and fury.”
A fresh and perceptive analysis of Roosevelt’s contributions to literature.Pub Date: April 3, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5126-0166-4
Page Count: 368
Publisher: ForeEdge/Univ. Press of New England
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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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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