Quietly reflective and gorgeously written, though somewhat meandering.
A daughter chronicles her journey to understand the complexities of silence, myth-making and taboo that have shaped her family’s history.
When Fanny Howe and Carl Senna wed in 1968, their interracial union was widely regarded in liberal circles as a symbol of the promise of their generation. The relationship, however, proved disastrous for both the couple and for their children. Novelist Senna (Symptomatic, 2004, etc.) portrays a home shaped by her parents’ abusive relationship and the legacy of their equally unhappy divorce. She provides harrowing details about growing up with an irresponsible, intermittently alcoholic father and a frequently impoverished single mother. At the heart of this personal history lies the author’s search for her roots—not her mother’s well-recorded descent from the founding families of New England, but her father’s multiracial Southern background and the evasions, half-truths and unspoken stories that defined it. In the course of unraveling the mystery of her father’s parentage and following the trail of his bloodlines, Senna squarely confronts the issues of race and ethnic identity in American history. Luminous prose carries along a narrative that might otherwise have failed to hold the reader’s attention. For all its revelations of buried family secrets, her memoir does not have a particularly strong story arc; on several occasions, for example, recollections are simply presented under the title “More fragments.” The result is a compendium of fascinating and perhaps deliberately unassimilated details, rather than a sustained narrative of satisfying self-discovery.
Quietly reflective and gorgeously written, though somewhat meandering.Pub Date: May 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-374-28915-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2009
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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