A moving saga that (just) steers clear of the nostalgic swamp most hometown memoirs sink into.
Hickam’s 1950s West Virginian coal-town story (Rocket Boys, 1998) continues: a polished memoir of a roughhewn place seen through his eyes as a perceptive, questing teenager.
Not exactly Versailles to begin with, Coalwood slid into outright misery when Hickam was a boy. Once a benign company town—prosperous, safe, paternal—it was sold to a steel conglomerate not long after the miners formed a union. A kind of winter of the soul then descended upon Coalwood, which was now just another item on the ledger that had to show a profit. Suddenly, the miners had to buy their houses (or get out), forget about medical treatments, increase their production (with no expansion of manpower), and underwrite all town activities themselves. Of course, as the author explains, these had been the very ties that bound Coalwood together. For the first time, hunger came to town, and Hickam’s father, the mine superintendent, felt each new insult from the steel company as a blow to the solar plexus. Unlike the author’s earlier memoir, which centered on the rocket club he belonged to and mined the rocket metaphor as relentlessly as the town dug coal, this one is more diffuse. A number of strains play themselves out against the background malaise: the mother’s desire to flee Coalwood, the little cruelties of small-town life balanced by little acts of kindness, the gamble taken in reopening a jinxed shaft, and the author’s hurtful relationship with his father (a distant, careworn, black-lunged character). Hickam overdoes the youthful rustic pose, and home truths clog the airwaves (“I’m sorry you got troubles, Sonny, but that’s called life”). But in its quiet, sentimental, coming-of-age way, Hickam’s story is involving, and he paints a nice landscape: “Coalwood’s houses were jammed between steep, humpbacked mountains packed so close together a boy with a good arm could throw a rock from one hill to the other.” And the ending—a happy one, all around—couldn’t be too sweet for Coalwood’s deserving townsfolk.
A moving saga that (just) steers clear of the nostalgic swamp most hometown memoirs sink into.Pub Date: Oct. 17, 2000
ISBN: 0-385-33516-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2000
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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