A moving portrait of two unalike but kindred spirits who did indeed “Dare [to] see a Soul at the ‘White Heat.’ ”
The editor criticized for dumbing down the great American poet’s work gets a fairer assessment from literary biographer Wineapple (Hawthorne, 2003, etc.).
Dickinson (1830–86) wrote her first letter to Higginson (1823–1911) in 1862, coyly asking, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” She had not chosen him at random; known as an ardent proponent of women’s rights, he had just published an article in the Atlantic Monthly offering advice to aspiring writers. Higginson responded positively, but advised Dickinson to “delay” publication and made some attempts to regularize her unconventional prosody and punctuation. Ever since, scholars have depicted him as the clueless Victorian who condescended to genius. On the contrary, Wineapple demonstrates in her astute assessment of their quarter-century epistolary relationship (they met in person only a few times), he was in awe of her from the beginning, well aware that his considerable gifts as a polemicist and essayist paled in comparison to her brilliance. Quoting extensively from Dickinson’s letters to Higginson and the poems she enclosed in them (his side of the correspondence has been lost), the author shows a powerful—and sexually suggestive—writer who disguised her forcefulness in coquettish, sometimes simpering prose. Higginson was not fooled. He had never met anyone “who drained my nerve power so much,” he wrote to his wife after their first meeting. “I am glad not to live near her.” At a safe distance, he relished the privilege of being the favored recipient of “thoughts of such a quality.” Wineapple never makes quite clear what Higginson gave the poet other than a sympathetic ear, and she devotes too many pages to his ardent abolitionism, which had little impact on Dickinson. Still, she paints a warm portrait of an honorable man remarkably free from the prejudices of his time whose appeal for his sequestered friend—and appreciation of her artistry—is evident. The biographer blames co-editor Mabel Loomis Todd for most of the editorial meddling in the posthumous 1890 and 1891 editions of Dickinson’s work.
A moving portrait of two unalike but kindred spirits who did indeed “Dare [to] see a Soul at the ‘White Heat.’ ”Pub Date: Aug. 13, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4401-6
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2008
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
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
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