Exemplary and illuminating, even for readers well versed in Lincolniana.
A fine, brief life of the Great Emancipator by the Australian novelist (Woman of the Inner Sea, 1993, etc.) and biographer (American Scoundrel, p. 31, etc.).
Keneally voices an antipodean appreciation for Lincoln as a child of the rough, violent frontier, a milieu that did much to forge his character and sorrowful countenance. (Lincoln once remarked to a journalist of his childhood, “ ‘The short and simple annals of the poor.’ That’s my life, and that’s all you or anyone else can make of it.”) From this setting, the author teases out little-reported data, including the fact that while serving in the frontier militia, Lincoln may have contracted syphilis from a prostitute, which led him to much subsequent worry about his fitness as a father—though not, as it no doubt would in the present political climate, to any public scandal. Keneally’s Lincoln is a man of extraordinary character built against extraordinary odds, but also a man of ordinary mortal failings, as fond of dirty jokes as he was of the works of Daniel Defoe and William Shakespeare. He emerges in these pages as nothing short of a hero, though a human one; this slim volume does not in any way resemble Carl Sandburg’s two-volume hagiography. Keneally conveys an informed understanding of just how controversial Lincoln was in his time (he writes, for instance, that the “house divided” speech ran the risk of killing Lincoln’s political career, which was salvaged largely by soundly showing up opponent Stephen Douglas in the barnstorming debates of 1858) and just how close he came to failure in attempting to restore the Union, which even Lincoln’s great admirer Horace Greeley was moved to call “our bleeding, bankrupt, almost dying nation” during the reelection campaign of 1864. In short, his view of Lincoln is so fresh that one wishes only that the Penguin Lives format afforded Keneally room to say still more about this iconic leader.
Exemplary and illuminating, even for readers well versed in Lincolniana.Pub Date: Dec. 30, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03175-5
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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