A troubling, important assessment of Yeats’s life and work.
A cogent—and densely scholarly—political study by Dublin historian and librarian Mc Cormack that delves uneasily into Yeats’s flirtation with fascism and eugenics.
By the end of Yeats’s life, in early 1939, the great Irish poet and Nobel laureate was deeply disillusioned by the course of Irish politics, in which he had been active for decades. His group of friends, such as Maude Gonne and her pro-Nazi son-in-law Francis Stuart, were anti-Semites, and his own After Strange Gods (1934) is explicit in its hostility toward Jews, while the posthumously published On the Boiler (1939) is a methodical treatment of the politics of hatred. The first major poke at Yeats’s Brahmin status among intellectuals came about with Conor Cruise O’Brien’s 1965 essay “Passion and Cunning,” which exploded the poet’s fascist leanings and knocked him from the pedestal established in earlier biographies by Joseph Hone, Richard Ellmann and A.N. Jeffares. Mc Cormack works backward here, from the pall surrounding the poet’s death to the announcement of Yeats as co-winner of the Frankfurt Plakette award in honor of Goethe’s centenary in 1932, sanctioned by the new Nazi regime, and the German production of his play The Countess Cathleen in 1934, produced by SS commander Friedrich Bethge. The author even explores Yeats’s confusion over sexuality and politics after his vasectomy in 1935, when he was 70, a procedure that seemed to have restored his manly vigor. Moreover, Yeats was actively wooed by the Nazis, as the author notes: “His ‘mystical’ and folklore interests were manifestly compatible with their ideology.” Mc Cormack moves backward still into the “intrusive ghosts” of Augustan poets like Swift, who haunted the poet’s work and mindset, as well as the Victorian roots in engendering the twin motivating forces of the early-20th century—militarism and anti-Semitism. Mc Cormack has previously written on the Anglo-Irish literary tradition, and his writing is erudite and well-informed, though often murky to navigate. However, this is a significant study, cold-eyed and solidly researched.
A troubling, important assessment of Yeats’s life and work.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-7126-6514-5
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Pimlico/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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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