This gossipy sketch by a poet and critic accurately outlines the life of the beloved novelist, without however fully sounding the depths of her character. Austen (17751817) grew up in the Hampshire village of Steventon, where her father was rector. When Austen was in her mid-20s the family moved to Bath for a few years, before returning to quiet retirement in the Hampshire countryside. Throughout her life, Austen was trapped by her family's genteel poverty and by her restricted status as an unmarried woman. She found an outlet in composing novels, which she began to publish, anonymously, in 1811, starting with Sense and Sensibility. Her novels were sensationally popular, but she never received much personal recognition. In 1817, an illness (now believed to have been Addison's disease) tragically cut short her life. Until her brief professional success, Austen lived what was by conventional standards an uneventful life. She never ventured out of England, never fought for a cause or fell into scandal. Drawing from memoirs by friends and acquaintances, and in particular from remaining letters (Austen's sister and confidante Cassandra destroyed their correspondence from bleak periods), Myer ably stitches together a patchwork account of Austen's family life, social scene, tentative and failed romances, and literary pursuits. But without a solid record of the novelist's disappointments or lack thereof, Myer's title conceit, that Austen's ``obstinate heart'' led her to refuse unworthy suitors, seems somewhat beside the point. Also, while Myer dwells on Austen's sometimes vicious sense of humor, she doesn't really convey the radical creativity that Austen invested in ironic pleasantries and cruelties. To Myer, ``making jokes on painful subjects'' represents Austen's ``way of coping'': It might have been more fully explored as a way of life and a means to art. While those made curious by the large (and small) screen versions of Austen's works could do worse, true Austen fanatics will not be satisfied. (16 pages of b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 1-55970-387-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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
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