Poet Carpenter hits the ground running in his first novel with rich language and lofty ideals, but loses steam with a premise that becomes exhausted by the end. Penguin Solstice, a radical feminist freshman at Dartmouth, and three activist friends translate their passion for justice into arson when they torch the Beta Sig house in retaliation for a gang rape that took place there. Expelled from school, Penguin travels to Squid Harbor, Cape Cod, where her divorced father, a famous sculptor, and his 26-year-old protÇgÇe and new wife, Dorothy, are living in a seaside cabin. Unsure of her next move, Penguin accepts the invitation of long-time family friend and neighbor, distinguished Harvard professor Joshua Brand, to care for his dying lover while he's out of town. Responsibility has never before disturbed Penguin's cynical, cerebral life, but she rises to its challenge by tending well and becoming attached to her patient, Arnold Franchetti, a composer who is fighting to complete his last score before succumbing to AIDS. The plot conflict—and the obstacle to readers' appreciation of the novel- -involves the unquestioned assumption that nobody must know of Arnold's existence or disease. When proselytizing Dorothy discovers and reveals it, the community's fearful reaction (extreme even for a late '80s setting) strains the novel's credibility. Would nobody in a small town, even friends, know about Joshua's love life? Would bohemian artists be shocked and frightened by AIDS? Aside from this big wrinkle, the novel is intelligent and strong. Literary images and devices—the blood-carrying mosquitoes, the purple birthmark that gave Penguin her nickname, sheep—show their effectiveness with their seams, and the trials of our scrappy heroine transform her convincingly from a self-righteous student into a thoughtful adult. The vigor and insight of the poet's pen overcomes his sometimes overwrought material in a promising debut. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 1-57131-000-2
Page Count: 328
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
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
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.
“Quality of life means more than just consumption”: Two MIT economists urge that a smarter, more politically aware economics be brought to bear on social issues.
It’s no secret, write Banerjee and Duflo (co-authors: Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way To Fight Global Poverty, 2011), that “we seem to have fallen on hard times.” Immigration, trade, inequality, and taxation problems present themselves daily, and they seem to be intractable. Economics can be put to use in figuring out these big-issue questions. Data can be adduced, for example, to answer the question of whether immigration tends to suppress wages. The answer: “There is no evidence low-skilled migration to rich countries drives wage and employment down for the natives.” In fact, it opens up opportunities for those natives by freeing them to look for better work. The problem becomes thornier when it comes to the matter of free trade; as the authors observe, “left-behind people live in left-behind places,” which explains why regional poverty descended on Appalachia when so many manufacturing jobs left for China in the age of globalism, leaving behind not just left-behind people but also people ripe for exploitation by nationalist politicians. The authors add, interestingly, that the same thing occurred in parts of Germany, Spain, and Norway that fell victim to the “China shock.” In what they call a “slightly technical aside,” they build a case for addressing trade issues not with trade wars but with consumption taxes: “It makes no sense to ask agricultural workers to lose their jobs just so steelworkers can keep theirs, which is what tariffs accomplish.” Policymakers might want to consider such counsel, especially when it is coupled with the observation that free trade benefits workers in poor countries but punishes workers in rich ones.
Occasionally wonky but overall a good case for how the dismal science can make the world less—well, dismal.Pub Date: Nov. 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-61039-950-0
Page Count: 432
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Aug. 28, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
SEEN & HEARD
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