A taste of living theater, with all its entanglements, fragments, and doldrums.
A fleshed-out diary of a year spent on an island—man, woman, child, dogs—that, in its reflection of the quotidian, isn’t always totally engaging.
With a piece of the cash from his bestselling My Old Man and the Sea (1995), Hays purchased an island off the Canadian coast, 50 acres of unedited earth surrounded by the North Atlantic. It’s a place, as Hays tells it in his plainspoken, intelligent voice, to escape civilization, a wild land where he can find himself. Except now he has a wife and Stephan, her 11-year-old son, with all that age’s bright and dim spots. So what Hays must do is find himself within the matrix of family as he basks in the glory of the island landscape, a task he chronicles in this catalogue of days. Much of the material, though nicely shaped, is simply a recounting of activities: putting up wood for winter (though how they burn all that unseasoned wood is a mystery), making a dock, building and rebuilding all the stuff they need (and, killing time, don’t need: “Now comes the really stupid part: having forgotten why I am putting an unneeded shelf nowhere useful”). There is the process of getting to know Stephan, perhaps the most captivating aspect of the story, and the incessant bickering with his wife, perhaps the least captivating, though certainly the most pervasive. The island itself, which appears in fits and starts throughout the narrative, is an enigma—its heart an impenetrable spruce thicket—and readers must accept Hays’s love of the place rather than share it. What does come intensely across are those blood-red skies, all that weather, shrieking winds, stormy seas, and bell-clear days.
A taste of living theater, with all its entanglements, fragments, and doldrums.Pub Date: June 7, 2002
ISBN: 1-56512-345-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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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