Powerful, funny, and moving: an effortless series of incidents full of droll wisdom.
Strong, original, wrenching account of growing up out of wedlock in a small Irish town, by memoirist (Home Before Night, 1980) and playwright (Da) Leonard.
Leonard writes with an elegant Irish accent, and his evocation of place is uncanny. Like Flann O'Brien, he writes about the town of Dalkey a great deal, often with a marvelous sense of humor. (Priests especially rouse him to outstanding efforts.) Irony and farce are everywhere, along with a calm, unblinking acceptance of human nature. His mother's periodic alcoholism (coinciding with the Christmas season) is a powerful, fully faced moment, and the dogged pursuit of sexual congress is an ongoing obbligato that evokes Dylan Thomas and a world long gone. ("I'm Protestant,'' says one promising lass, having deduced his Catholicism, and walks off with a smile; another girl's dying father struggles out of bed to investigate.) The bedrock is Leonard's long, hard, Horatio Alger climb from the ultimate obscurity of unwanted bastardy. From success in school exams and the start of a civil-service career (which represents as much success as he and his family could ever reasonably expect), Leonard struggles forward via tiny, hilarious, amateur provincial theater groups, drunk on whatever writer he is reading at the moment. All the while, his ambiguous origins (even as a child he is known by two names) mark him, as such things do in small communities. He makes it anyway.
Powerful, funny, and moving: an effortless series of incidents full of droll wisdom.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 1991
ISBN: 0-233-98474-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Andre Deutsch/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
BOOK REVIEW
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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