A roguishly charming memoir.
Debut memoirist Righten describes his working-class childhood and erstwhile young adulthood amid a motley crew of relatives and friends in Ireland and England.
Righten’s memoir will remind readers of a drunken evening in a pub spent listening to tales of a sordid and colorful life. He takes turns as a rollicking fighter, pub denizen and gambler before, eventually, becoming a humanitarian. With a sly, ironic voice, Righten avoids sentimentalizing his life by undercutting every harsh observation with humor; ever the “Fenian bastard,” Righten has a gift for rendering the eccentricities of his friends and relatives in a comedic way. Wacky travel anecdotes and scenes of brawls, workplace shenanigans, and football matches gone awry are lively and engrossing. However, this is not a memoir for the straight-laced, politically correct or fainthearted: Massive quantities of alcohol are consumed, many teeth are knocked out, and sarcasm is in generous supply. Righten’s life philosophy, represented in the title, plays a large part in the narrative. He believes that even the most unlikely of rogues has a moral compass and is capable of unexpected acts of kindness. Of course, the author employs a uniquely flexible definition of good, which may include violence against cheating husbands and abusive fathers. But readers will find it difficult to disagree with the thrust of Righten’s arguments in the second half of this memoir, which focuses on the author’s career as a humanitarian worker in Bosnia and Latin America. His run-in with a sociopathic mercenary is particularly chilling, as are his descriptions of delivering medicine to hospitals filled with traumatized, needy children during the Bosnian War. Righten’s own near-death experiences will convince readers that the author is one of the benevolent scoundrels he so admires.
A roguishly charming memoir.Pub Date: Feb. 22, 2012
ISBN: 978-1467889476
Page Count: 472
Publisher: AuthorHouseUK
Review Posted Online: April 17, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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