An important reassessment of Irving that restores him to his rightful place as a founder of American literature.
The first major biography in a half-century of one of America’s first professional writers, from a historian (History/Univ. of Tulsa) who specializes in early America (Jefferson’s Secrets, 2005, etc.).
Burstein’s is a conventional telling of a literary life. He begins with a glance at post-Revolutionary New York, brings his hero onstage, tells his life story, ends with an assessment of his influence. But Irving has long needed such a thorough, sympathetic treatment. Burstein shows the enormous influence of Irving’s family (he was the youngest of 11), illustrates thoughtfully his political life (he met presidents, was friends with Aaron Burr, officially served his government, in the U.S. and abroad), chronicles his relationships with iconic colleagues—Walter Scott, Poe, Godwin, Mary Shelley (who, in widowhood, wished for more than mere friendship with Irving), Dickens, Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper (who barked at and bit his fellow New Yorker). Burstein also does an intelligent job of explicating Irving’s works—and it’s sad to note that he must summarize even “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” neither of which, he says, retains its prominence in the public-school curriculum. Using Irving’s volumes of correspondence and travel journals (with the acknowledged help of the scholarly editions of Irving’s work prepared decades ago by the Univ. of Wisconsin and Twayne Publishers), Burstein is able to explore the origins of Irving’s prose. Irving emerges here as a highly professional, productive and satiric writer who published travel books, sketches, stories, histories, biographies (including his final work, a five-volume life of George Washington, whom he met and for whom he was named). Like other scholars, Burstein is troubled by Irving’s sex life. Did he have one? Was he gay? Or was he a stereotypical asexual bachelor uncle who enjoyed the company of women, especially younger ones? Burstein believes the evidence is insufficient to make a definitive answer.
An important reassessment of Irving that restores him to his rightful place as a founder of American literature.Pub Date: March 1, 2007
ISBN: 0-465-00853-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Basic Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
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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