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SAMUEL JOHNSON

Name: SAMUEL JOHNSON
Author: W. Jackson Bate
ISBN: 1582435243

A BIOGRAPHY

by W. Jackson Bate ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 25, 1977

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Why, some will ask, another biography of that print-drenched Englishman, especially so soon after John Wain's acclaimed contribution? Quite simply, because this one is by Harvard's W. Jackson Bate, Pulitzer Prize-winner (John Keats) and a scholar who believes, with Johnson, that biographies should be not just entertainments or theses but reassuring lessons in the hard job of living. While Wain's cool, sharp study connected Johnson's moral voice to 20th-century depravity, Bate gravely and warmly embraces Johnson's life-and-writings as an inspiring, personal touchstone for all times: "Whatever we experience, we find Johnson has been there before us, and is meeting and returning home with us." There is little that's new—there's been little new since Boswell, Thrale, and Hawkins—in the facts Bate presents: the awkward, half-blind, half-deaf, tic-ridden, pockmarked body; the decades of hack writing, poverty, and camaraderie; the prodigious feats of self-education, speed-writing, the Dictionary; the tender attachments to an elderly bride, the gifted (Garrick, Goldsmith, Reynolds), and the wayward. But, using a homely blend of psychoanalysis, scholarship, and sheer empathy, Bate draws from the life its universal quandaries: the fight against sloth, the impossible pressures of self-demand, the fear of insanity, the pursuit and distrust of religion, the quest for self-management. Johnson's breakdowns—in his twenties and at mid-life—resound with implicit, contemporary echoes. And, in the works, Bate finds Johnson's intuitive understanding—in himself and others—of the terrain later charted by Freud: the "stratagems of self-defence"; the nature of wishing, boredom, envy; the admission that the mind is not a serene, rational instrument. Even Bate's most professorial critiques (counting verbs, diagramming the Johnsonian sentence) are linked, gracefully, to the real—"the real issues are still not dead." At one point, Bate reminds us that Johnson's formal, idea-laden poem, "The Vanity of Human Wishes," was known to have drawn 18th-century tears from the sort of readers immune to sentimental assaults. This compassionate, dead-center biography, quietly gathering hope for us all as it follows its handicapped "heroic pilgrim. . . through this strange adventure of life," should have a similar impact on readers in our own time and in times to come.

Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1977

ISBN: 1582435243

Page Count: 370

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1977

Categories:

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | GENERAL NONFICTION

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BLACK BOY

A RECORD OF CHILDHOOD AND YOUTH

by Richard Wright ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 28, 1945

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This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.

It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.

Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.

Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945

ISBN: 0061130249

Page Count: 450

Publisher: N/A

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945

Categories:

GENERAL BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR

- BOOK REVIEW
THE MAN WHO LIVED UNDERGROUND
by Richard Wright

- BOOK REVIEW
SEEING INTO TOMORROW
by Richard Wright ; illustrated by Nina Crews

- BOOK REVIEW
A FATHER’S LAW
by Richard Wright

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NIGHT

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...

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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.

The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance.