by Dave Itzkoff ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 18, 2011
A satisfying journey into the depths of hard-heartedness and the struggle to heal an old wound.
A son's attempt to salvage a relationship with his cocaine-addict father.
New York Times culture reporter Itzkoff (Lads: A Memoir of Manhood, 2004) explores the complications of forgiving a man who may have deserved no second chances. As a boy, the author viewed his father as an ally in the fight against Hebrew School, but he soon realized that these minor heroics did little to make up for his mysterious absences. Though he was unable to discern his father's secret, Itzkoff’s mother revealed the truth: “He's a drug addict, Davey,” she informed him. “He's been addicted to cocaine almost your whole life.” Years passed, though the author continued to struggle to understand his abnormal familial circumstances. While in college, Itzkoff paid a rare visit to his father's office and saw a display of family photos that he deemed incapable of telling the “complete story of a family.” The author’s memoir picks up where the “profoundly untrue” display left off, offering a front-row seat to his father's addiction. Yet despite witnessing his father at his worst—“all that remained in the room were a few rolled-up dollar bills on a nightstand, a glossy porno magazine on the floor, and a frightened old man shivering on the bed, his nostrils cemented shut with a mixture of blood and mucus, his eyelids sealed closed by some bodily fluid whose origins I couldn’t even guess at”—the author also became a drug user, experimenting primarily with marijuana, though he tried cocaine as well. Itzkoff’s sheepish admission of personal guilt removes the possibility of a moral high ground, and to the book's benefit, levels the playing field, allowing both father and son to face their struggles together. The pair attempted to overcome their obstacles by attending joint therapy, utilizing their drug use as common ground for a fresh start. But after the therapy proved unsuccessful, Itzkoff made one final attempt at reconciliation—this time, simply by listening to his father's painful tale from start to finish and beginning the slow work of righting the wrongs of the past.
A satisfying journey into the depths of hard-heartedness and the struggle to heal an old wound.Pub Date: Jan. 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6572-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2010
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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 Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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