Traveling Mercies set a very high standard, and to say that Plan B almost gets there is still to say that it’s a wonderful...
Funny, acerbic reflections on faith and family during George W. Bush’s first administration.
Readers have long awaited Lamott’s second book on spirituality (after Traveling Mercies, 1999), and it won’t disappoint—or not too much. As before, Lamott charts her life as a deeply religious Christian and committed leftist, though she’s no stereotypically pious Presbyterian. For example, she has dreadlocks and an out-of-wedlock son, her beloved Sam. She wears a red bracelet that was blessed by the Dalai Lama, and she hates Republicans, most especially George W. Bush. In the essays here, many from Salon, Lamott portrays herself as a mother heroically trying to figure out how to parent a smart—and occasionally smart-alecky—teenager. She also describes her attempts to love her aging, sagging body. And she takes readers inside her wonderfully warm church, still under the leadership of the awesome Veronica. Throughout, we read about her struggle to forgive her dead mother, and, because Lamott’s trademark humor and irreverence mark practically every page, readers will howl with laughter at Lamott’s inability to do anything with Mom’s ashes other than leave them in her closet. But there’s also the real work Lamott is doing here, the hard, slow work of forgiveness, and things can get teary. Still, the book doesn’t quite live up to its predecessor. One example will suffice: Somehow Sam, whom readers first met in utero in Operating Instructions (1993), then as an enchanting grammar-schooler in Traveling, doesn’t make quite as charming a character this time around. Lamott’s approach to parenting an adolescent is not without wisdom, but reading about the Lamotts’ battles over homework is neither entertaining nor illuminating.
Traveling Mercies set a very high standard, and to say that Plan B almost gets there is still to say that it’s a wonderful read Lamott’s legions of fans will no doubt lap up.Pub Date: March 3, 2005
ISBN: 1-57322-299-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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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