Exquisitely paced, masterful storytelling.
A George Polk Award– and Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist skillfully investigates the history of his family, recovering the life of the father he never knew.
Near the end of this affecting memoir, veteran New York Times correspondent Darnton (Black and White and Dead All Over, 2008, etc.) marvels at the “difference that one little sliver of shrapnel meant to our lives.” He’s referring first to the bomb fragment that killed his father, NYT correspondent Barney Darnton, during World War II, and second to his mother “Tootie,” brother Bob and himself, only 11 months old when Barney died. Not until 60 years later, after decades of romanticizing and mythologizing his father, did John set out to discover just who Barney really was. The man he unearths is far different from the idealized figure in his head, the entire excavation complicated by the layers of silence or fabrication Tootie supplied her boys as she buckled under the pressures of single-parenting, moving to a succession of increasingly modest homes and assuming a string of important and then less-worthy jobs, losing them not to the “grogginess” she complained of, but rather to alcoholism. Darnton chronicles how he and his brother grew and coped, but mostly he focuses on his parents, and especially the search for Barney. From notebooks, clip files, letters and government archives, the author assembles a picture of his father, and he learns even more from numerous interviews with his parents’ colleagues, friends and family members. He journeys across America, to an island off Scotland and to the New Guinea beach where Barney’s corpse was canoed ashore—he interviews the soldier horrified by handling that bloody detail and a native, only six at the time, who witnessed the aerial attack—following leads as far as possible, seeking only the truth. The facts he uncovers—about his father’s character, about the incident that killed him, about his parents’ meeting—are often uncomfortable, but, thirsty for honest answers, he faithfully reports what he learns.
Exquisitely paced, masterful storytelling.Pub Date: March 17, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-26617-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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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