An empathic, highly informative celebration of the legacy of a profoundly decent but decidedly imperfect man who considered...
A buoyant, expressive biography of British novelist E.M. Forster (1879–1970), whose homosexuality had a profound effect on his literary output and career.
In her first book, Moffat (English/Dickinson Coll.) leaves no doubt about her focus. The prologue takes its title from a quote: “Start with the Fact That He Was Homosexual.” As does the first chapter: “A Queer Moment.” Though the author examines the sex life of Forster, it isn’t her intent to arouse prurient interest or to grind political axes. Exhaustively researched and engagingly written, this sexual-literary biography builds a convincing case that until one comes to terms with Forster’s homosexuality, which he long had difficulty coming to terms with himself, it is impossible to come to terms with his work. Moffat’s novelistic command of detail reinforces the sense of intimacy, though those more accustomed to academic convention might not be comfortable with her referring throughout to her subject as “Morgan” (as his friends did), and with her use of first names and even nicknames for other principal characters. Yet such familiarity suits a narrative that illuminates the soul of a writer who suffered from such “paralyzing shyness” that he feared through his mid-30s that he might never consummate a sexual relationship, who long considered the act of homosexual love “unspeakable” and therefore unpublishable, yet “to the end of his life…recognized the sexual force as a wellspring of his creative work.” The biography begins with and then builds to the posthumous publication of Maurice (1971), the homosexually themed work that had occupied his creativity for decades when the public thought he had retired from novel writing, and which underwent substantial revisions after Forster gained experience in not only sex but homosexual love.
An empathic, highly informative celebration of the legacy of a profoundly decent but decidedly imperfect man who considered himself “the outsidest of outsiders.”Pub Date: May 18, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-374-16678-6
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2010
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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