A fruitful, well-written blend of cultural history, literary criticism, and biography. Now the only question is, where’s the...
Jack London—socialist agitator, rancher, and, oh yes, writer: an illuminating study of a literary figure long receded into stereotype.
Tichi’s (English and American Studies/Vanderbilt Univ.; Civic Passions: Seven Who Launched Progressive America (and What They Teach Us), 2009, etc.) resurrection of London and her elevation of him from writer of hoary Arctic tales for children to wizened philosopher of the barricades is certainly timely. He lived in the first Gilded Age, a time “undershot with stupendous wealth inequality, cycles of joblessness…and an imperial global presence that brought indigenous populations to heel while exploiting their natural resources.” Though London was a marquee writer whose work elevated him from want to wealth, he remained true to his working-class roots and never surrendered his vision of an America reformed to allow for a greater share for all. He conveyed this vision in sometimes heavy-handed ways, as with his late novel The Iron Heel (1908), but Tichi credits him for displaying “a certain subtlety.” London’s message rings true in such books as White Fang (1906) but never at the expense of a walloping good story. Tichi traces the growth of London’s activism as he moved from place to place, especially when he visited the South Pacific and saw predatory capitalism at work undisguised: “In boyhood he had seen the flags of distant nations flying from the masts along the Oakland waterfront….Many of those flags signified political, corporate, and military power, and the word for that nexus was ‘imperialism.’ ” Tichi also limns a London who was far more evolved than the square-jawed prizefighter and adventurer of legend, a sophisticated political thinker who brought immense learning to bear—not least on his work establishing what today we would call an organic farm not far from San Francisco, building a vast working knowledge of agriculture, construction, irrigation, and other fields.
A fruitful, well-written blend of cultural history, literary criticism, and biography. Now the only question is, where’s the Jack London of today?Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4696-2266-8
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Univ. of North Carolina
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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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