A slim addition to a long bookshelf on depression.
A writerly account of the downward spiral of clinical depression.
Writing about one’s own depression presents unique challenges. Sinking into the abyss typically renders the writer incapable of writing, so such memoirs are almost invariably written well after the fact, with the writer describing what, at the time, seemed an affectless void. Prize-winning novelist Guterson (Ed King, 2011, etc.) differs from many in knowing specifically what triggered his depression and exactly when it started. He was in Washington, D.C., during the attacks of 9/11 and found himself not only devastated, but wondering how others could resume their lives, almost as if nothing had happened: “Anyone not despondent, I believed, was wearing blinders. The rightness of unhappiness was obvious and clear. The only reasonable response to the world was an overwhelming and excruciating sadness; everything else was willful delusion.” Reasonable enough, but neither his drive home to Washington state nor the months that followed lifted his spirits. Guterson consulted therapists, took pills and pondered suicide. It’s impossible to criticize the recovery and catharsis reflected in this manuscript, but it’s plain that he’s no longer at a loss for words and that those words seem self-consciously literary. Of discussing his condition with his family, he writes, “There is such a thing as filial indulgence and a manner of discourse possible between siblings that’s possible nowhere else. In other words, our dialogue was fraught with complication to the point of a compelling Freudian mootness.” Only in the last few pages does he turn the corner toward a recovery more gradual and less specifically causal (pills? time? love?) than the shock that blindsided him.
A slim addition to a long bookshelf on depression.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8041-6925-7
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Vintage
Review Posted Online: Aug. 11, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2013
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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