by Caryl Phillips ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 21, 2002
Overall: perceptive and heartfelt.
A strong gathering of personal and literary essays on identity and authorship, from accomplished novelist Phillips (The Nature of Blood, 1997, etc.).
As he explains in his introduction, Phillips feels “unmoored.” A man of African descent born on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts, reared in Britain, and writing in America, he has a number of possible homes. Phillips feels “of and not of” each place, he says, and this sense of displacement is the focus of the collection. Each examination ultimately turns on the subject’s reckoning of home. James Baldwin moved to France because he could not write on universal topics in America’s racist climate. J.M. Coetzee works to address and go beyond the problems of his South African homeland. V.S. Naipaul has made a career of distancing himself from his Trinidadian origins. In these cases and others, Phillips sees the relationship with home as inexorably linked to the quality of the art. One cannot write with understanding, he argues, without understanding one’s origins. This is not a flawless formulation—Naipaul’s prose, for example, deserves more praise than Phillips offers—but it serves to illuminate the difficulties of writing in a world eager to affix labels of race, nationality, and ethnicity to works of art. Nadine Gordimer is so intent on exploring the political situation in her native South Africa, Phillips suggests, that her fiction sometimes “scampers to the superficial beat of history” and scants deeper human truths. Derek Walcott, on the other hand, has reconciled place and art in his poetry. The essays vary in both length and quality. Discussing writers he admires, Phillips tends to let indented quotations speak for themselves, when fuller explanation might help. The best pieces present more flawed heroes and engage their complexity incisively and with insight, perhaps most powerfully in his stunning essay on Marvin Gaye.
Overall: perceptive and heartfelt.Pub Date: May 21, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-71403-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2002
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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 Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Paul Kalanithi ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 19, 2016
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
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A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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