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Reviewed Elsewhere
- Biography
- University of Hawai'i Press
- Volume 29, Number 1, Winter 2006
- pp. 193-269
- 10.1353/bio.2006.0025
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
Biography 29.1 (2006) 193-269
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Reviewed Elsewhere
Contributing editors Nell Altizer, Patricia Angley, Alana Bell, Judith Lütge Coullie, Helke Dreier, Michael Fassiotto, Marie-Christine Garneau, Théo Garneau, Noel Kent, John W. I. Lee, Gabriel Merle, Dawn Morais, Barbara Bennett Peterson, Forrest R. Pitts, George Simson, and Valeria Wenderoth provided the excerpts for this issue.
Publications reviewed include the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, L'Espresso, Far Eastern Economic Review, French Review, French Studies, Globe and Mail, Historische Zeitschrift, Historisch-Politische Buch, Journal of Asian Studies, Journal of World History, Le Monde des Livres, New York Review of Books (NYRB), New York Times Book Review (NYRBR), Le Nouvel Observateur, Presidential Studies Quarterly, Professional Geographer, La Repubblica, Studi Francesi, Times Literary Supplement (TLS), Washington Post National Weekly Edition (WP), Women's Review of Books, and Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung; and from South Africa, Artsmart, Cape Argus, Cape Times, The Herald, H-Net, LitNet, Mail and Guardian, Pretoria News, Rapport, Saturday Dispatch, Sowetan, The Star, The Sunday Independent, The Witness, and Wordstock.
Addams, Jane
"For all her identification with the mature Jane Addams, Knight, an independent scholar, has something in common with the woman who polished those shoes. 'Citizen' is written neither to make money nor to gain academic tenure; it is a gift, meant to enlighten and improve. Jane Addams would have understood."
Alan Wolfe. NYTBR, Jan. 15, 2006: 12
Afrika, Tatamkhulu
For all its apparent frankness and passion, the autobiography of the late, acclaimed poet Tatamkhulu Afrika (he changed his name many times) tells an oblique tale. It is a deeply interesting read, threaded throughout with issues of race, homosexuality and "friendship"—a minefield of marginality, acceptance and one-upmanship, negotiated with the intense awareness of one who was already a writer at 17. This finely textured, magnificently written account of a life often dark with anger, anguish and self-doubt is crammed with telling observation and poetic compression.
Jane Rosenthal. Mail & Guardian online: Books, Oct. 14, 2005 [End Page 193]
The hefty autobiography of Tatamkhulu Afrika is both fascinating and infuriating, awe-inspiring and yet often repellent. It begins with sex and guilt, and he rarely lets up his cardinal preoccupation, the testing of masculinity. On the close connections between Afrika's poetry and fiction and his autobiography one can imagine a pile of dissertations emerging. Born in Egypt, adopted by South African Methodists, Afrika "crossed over" from white identity to black and converted to Islam. Afrika can write marvellously—he is acutely observant, vivid, and capable of tenderness and humour—but some features of his style are quite awful (his macho verbal gestures—scabrous, often obscene—and some leaden sentence structures and redundancies). Moreover, the severe privations and cruelties he endured, and his profound psychological scarring, make this a harrowing book. All in all, credit to the publishers, Jacana, for taking this on.
Chris Dunton. Sunday Independent, Dec. 4, 2005: 17
Alexander II
"Lively and brilliant, both epic and epigrammatic, [this book] has been nimbly translated by Antonina Bouis. The narrative's principal flaw could be corrected with a single stroke of the pen. If the subtitle were changed to 'The Times and Reign of the Last Great Tsar,' we would expect what this book in fact provides—a portrait of the court with its shifting alliances; the hopes and panics of the era of reform; the feverish, exalted revolutionaries surrounded by a host of incidental figures who are always colorful if occasionally distracting. Then we wouldn't mind so much that the biography does not ever quite deliver the living, breathing man himself. Radzinsky's Alexander is an abstraction. The floorboards never creak beneath his weight."
Richard Lourie. NYTBR, Dec. 4, 2005: 68
"Anna"
The major...
