A quietly fierce, resoundingly literate pedagogic autobiography. In an age when books are often regarded as mere texts, Pritchard (English/Amherst Coll.; Frost: A Literary Life Reconsidered, 1984, etc.) is one of the few remaining champions of literature for its own sake, an eloquent advocate of letting books ``speak for themselves in such a way as to lift us into a new, absorbing world.'' Pritchard has the nerve to argue not only for the value of ``Great Books'' but also for reading's crucial role in teaching one to write and, indeed, to think. In the tradition of The Education of Henry Adams, Pritchard uses his own education as a fulcrum for trying to understand the swirl of his times. First as an undergraduate at Amherst and then as a graduate student at Columbia and Harvard, he was the beneficiary of what has often been called the ``golden age'' of American universities, a time when there was a ``virtually unanimous consensus about the best way to educate young people; about what they needed to know and the order in which they needed to know it.'' But then, as an English professor at Amherst, Pritchard watched in shock as the '60s tore this consensus apart. Some changes, including coeducation and increasing minority enrollment, were long overdue, but many, especially the gutting of core requirements, he regards as devastating. This decline of the American university has been frequently detailed but rarely with the kind of elegiac grace that characterizes this remembrance of things past. While Pritchard occasionally veers off into the esoteric and is a little too quote- happy (typical pitfalls of his profession), his intelligence and thoughtfulness are a welcome antidote to the spew and babble that have become all too characteristic of today's culture wars. A subtle, modest chronicle, yet one that often burns with a hard, gemlike flame.
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1995
ISBN: 1-55597-234-9
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Graywolf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1995
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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