Hutchinson's courage is beyond question, but LaPlante never manages to make her any more sympathetic than her Puritan...
An attempt to place Anne Hutchinson (1591–1643) as an early feminist, after being expelled from Massachusetts Bay colony in 1638 on charges of heresy and sedition.
LaPlante (Seized, 1993) begins with Hutchinson's trial before the Massachusetts General Court. Her real offenses, the author argues, consisted of building up a power base from which she challenged the colony's established church and government. LaPlante recapitulates Hutchinson's childhood in England, where her father capitulated to the power of the Anglican hierarchy. Anne, the second of 15 children, left England rather than bend to a church she considered corrupt. Convinced that she could distinguish those who were saved from those who were foredoomed, she stalked out of one Boston church rather than hear what she considered false doctrine. She began holding Bible discussion groups in her home, attended at first by other women, but increasingly by men. Convinced that her criticisms of the clergy would undermine the government, Governor John Winthrop brought her to trial. The outcome, LaPlante makes clear, was never in serious doubt. Arcane as the theological issues seem (her heresy was officially diagnosed as Antinomianism), the central issue was that a woman dared challenge the establishment. Banished from the colony, she moved to nearby Rhode Island, where she is today recognized as one of the founders of the state, as well as inspiration for its official policy of religious tolerance. Upon the death of her husband a few years later, she moved to upstate New York, where she and her large family perished in an Indian raid, having refused to arm themselves. LaPlante effectively details the intellectual climate in which Hutchinson flourished, and gives a vivid picture of 17th-century life in England and the colonies.
Hutchinson's courage is beyond question, but LaPlante never manages to make her any more sympathetic than her Puritan opponents.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-06-056233-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2003
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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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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