An immensely appealing remembrance of things past from the anchor of CBS-TV's Evening News. A Texan and proud of it, Rather (who turns 60 next Halloween) grew up on the wrong side of the tracks in Houston during the height of the Depression and WW II. His hard-working father was gainfully employed (no mean feat in those hard times) as a ditch digger for a local pipeline company. Consequently, the Rathers had money enough for life's necessities, albeit never in abundance. By the author's elegiac account—told with the help of veteran author Wyden (Wall: The Berlin Story, 1989, etc.)—the extended family also had true grit and love to spare. While paying graceful tribute to parents, relatives, friends, and other influences, Rather offers an episodic and anecdotal account of his formative years. In addition to the sympathetic adults who encouraged him to stay in school with glimpses of a wider world, he credits the instinctive independence of the Rather clan with putting him on the road to success. During the pre-TV era when young Dan was coming of age, newspapers and radio were the only media. Print and broadcast reports of epic battles in faraway places with strange-sounding names were the first source of Rather's youthful aspirations to become a foreign correspondent. The obvious misery of the jobless and dispossessed also appears to have given his outlook an endearingly populist spin. In the meantime, the author experienced the joys, sorrows, and occasional hard knocks (including a year in bed with rheumatic fever) of a boyhood that, if a bit too impoverished to qualify as idyllic, was at least marked by more highs than lows. A prominent American's vivid and sensitive recollections of his deep roots in a past that is now all but beyond recall. (Eight pages of b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-316-73440-3
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1991
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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