by John T. Price ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 15, 2008
A winsome, perceptive coming-of-age memoir.
An appealing, occasionally humorous journey from isolated childhood to fulfilling adulthood, set against the ever-dwindling prairies of small-town Iowa.
Price (English/Univ. of Nebraska, Omaha; Not Just Any Land: A Personal and Literary Journey Into the American Grasslands, 2004) uses a self-effacing voice to guide us through his early days as a youngster in Fort Dodge, surrounded by relatives who had emigrated there decades earlier from Sweden. Roaming alone through the woods sharpened his eye for nature’s beauty, and his generous description of Iowa’s woodlands, rivers and prairies, much of it now inexorably giving way to farmland and development, is a treat for the nature lover. Price is even more entertaining in his anecdotal chapters: “High Maintenance,” which chronicles his hapless attempts at plumbing; “Mole Man Lives!” an account of his nerdy revenge against obnoxious high-school classmates; and “Love Mountain,” which traces his awkward courtship of wife-to-be Stephanie, culminating in a honeymoon in a camp trailer. He introduces us to such memorable characters as his slowly failing grandpa Andy, whose increasing dementia surfaces in comical fantasies of Olympic gold medals and wrestling matches with grizzly bears. We also meet Price’s wayward cousin Dave, who parlays an early love for dark comics and heavy-metal music into a side career as a traveling lecturer on Satanic youth cults. The author is less successful when he reaches for deep meaning and metaphor in strained, overwritten considerations of the life journeys he and his ancestors have taken in America’s heartland. Nonetheless, Price knows how to find beauty in quiet moments, watching his 10-month-old son crawl through the grass alongside their oversized house cat, or savoring the stillness of an early-morning stroll following an overnight snowfall.
A winsome, perceptive coming-of-age memoir.Pub Date: April 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-306-81605-5
Page Count: 254
Publisher: Da Capo
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2008
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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