by W. Jackson Bate ‧ RELEASE DATE: Oct. 25, 1977
Why, some will ask, another biography of that print-drenched Englishman, especially so soon after John Wain's acclaimed contribution? Quite simply, because this one is by Harvard's W. Jackson Bate, Pulitzer Prize-winner (John Keats) and a scholar who believes, with Johnson, that biographies should be not just entertainments or theses but reassuring lessons in the hard job of living. While Wain's cool, sharp study connected Johnson's moral voice to 20th-century depravity, Bate gravely and warmly embraces Johnson's life-and-writings as an inspiring, personal touchstone for all times: "Whatever we experience, we find Johnson has been there before us, and is meeting and returning home with us." There is little that's new—there's been little new since Boswell, Thrale, and Hawkins—in the facts Bate presents: the awkward, half-blind, half-deaf, tic-ridden, pockmarked body; the decades of hack writing, poverty, and camaraderie; the prodigious feats of self-education, speed-writing, the Dictionary; the tender attachments to an elderly bride, the gifted (Garrick, Goldsmith, Reynolds), and the wayward. But, using a homely blend of psychoanalysis, scholarship, and sheer empathy, Bate draws from the life its universal quandaries: the fight against sloth, the impossible pressures of self-demand, the fear of insanity, the pursuit and distrust of religion, the quest for self-management. Johnson's breakdowns—in his twenties and at mid-life—resound with implicit, contemporary echoes. And, in the works, Bate finds Johnson's intuitive understanding—in himself and others—of the terrain later charted by Freud: the "stratagems of self-defence"; the nature of wishing, boredom, envy; the admission that the mind is not a serene, rational instrument. Even Bate's most professorial critiques (counting verbs, diagramming the Johnsonian sentence) are linked, gracefully, to the real—"the real issues are still not dead." At one point, Bate reminds us that Johnson's formal, idea-laden poem, "The Vanity of Human Wishes," was known to have drawn 18th-century tears from the sort of readers immune to sentimental assaults. This compassionate, dead-center biography, quietly gathering hope for us all as it follows its handicapped "heroic pilgrim. . . through this strange adventure of life," should have a similar impact on readers in our own time and in times to come.
Pub Date: Oct. 25, 1977
ISBN: 1582435243
Page Count: 370
Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1977
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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