A well-written, often poetic memoir that nevertheless fails to fully live up to its initial promise.
New York Times columnist Blow’s hardscrabble memoir about growing up poor and black in rural Louisiana.
It’s safe to say that debut memoirist Blow made his bones as a newspaper journalist in quite a different fashion than most of his peers at the stately Grey Lady. Brought up in dirt-poor Gibsland, Louisiana., he worked his way from being an intern at the tiny Shreveport Times to eventually, by age 25, a graphics editor at the New York Times and a columnist soon thereafter. But this memoir isn’t about his professional development as much as the psychosexual and emotional roller-coaster ride of his upbringing. Especially in the first half, Blow masterfully evokes the sights, sounds and smells of rough-and-tumble, backwater Louisiana. His portrait of his tough-as-nails mother—who raised five children on the wages from her poultry-plucking job and, at one point, shot her husband for cheating—is almost larger than life. But eventually we get to the crux of the memoir and the event in his young life that would understandably have serious psychological repercussions for years to come: being sexually molested by his cousin. When Blow moves on to his more conventional university life at Grambling State, a historically black college in his home state, readers begin to lose a sense of what made the memoir so original and compelling up to that point. The author still found himself in a struggle for both personal and sexual identity in college, but his experiences with hazing as a confused fraternity pledge, as trying and traumatic as they certainly were, don’t seem that far removed from the coming-of-age experiences of millions of other working-class university students.
A well-written, often poetic memoir that nevertheless fails to fully live up to its initial promise.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-22804-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: July 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.
In her first nonfiction book, novelist Grande (Dancing with Butterflies, 2009, etc.) delves into her family’s cycle of separation and reunification.
Raised in poverty so severe that spaghetti reminded her of the tapeworms endemic to children in her Mexican hometown, the author is her family’s only college graduate and writer, whose honors include an American Book Award and International Latino Book Award. Though she was too young to remember her father when he entered the United States illegally seeking money to improve life for his family, she idolized him from afar. However, she also blamed him for taking away her mother after he sent for her when the author was not yet 5 years old. Though she emulated her sister, she ultimately answered to herself, and both siblings constantly sought affirmation of their parents’ love, whether they were present or not. When one caused disappointment, the siblings focused their hopes on the other. These contradictions prove to be the narrator’s hallmarks, as she consistently displays a fierce willingness to ask tough questions, accept startling answers, and candidly render emotional and physical violence. Even as a girl, Grande understood the redemptive power of language to define—in the U.S., her name’s literal translation, “big queen,” led to ridicule from other children—and to complicate. In spelling class, when a teacher used the sentence “my mamá loves me” (mi mamá me ama), Grande decided to “rearrange the words so that they formed a question: ¿Me ama mi mamá? Does my mama love me?”
A standout immigrant coming-of-age story.Pub Date: Aug. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6177-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: June 11, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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