The rise and fall of a one-book wonder, told by the Pulitzer Prizewinning Washington Post literary critic. If Exley's raucous ``fictional memoir'' of failure, fame, and football, A Fan's Notes, is a cult book, then Yardley (Ring: A Biography of Ring Lardner, 1977) has been a steadfast apostle. Since its publication in 1968, he has promoted it in his newspaper writing and written an introduction to the Modern Library edition (to be published simultaneously with this biography). He was also a distant friend to Exley, ``the most elusive and mysterious of men,'' a charming and exasperating ne'er-do-well, sponger, and barstool-propping man of letters. Despite this relationship, Yardley proves tough and objective in re-creating Exley's life, which differs little in substance from A Fan's Notes. Exley (192992) was the feckless younger son of the local football hero of Watertown, a small upstate New York burg. This might have been the son's only claim to fame had he not written a book that Yardley ranks alongside Invisible Man and The Adventures of Augie March for its evocation of a young man's disaffection with the American Way. A Fan's Notes apart, the biographic trail is scant in the early years, but Yardley connects Exley's departure from mainstream life not only to his father's early death and his failed romance as an adolescent with a WASP debutante, but also to a car accident that ended his own mediocre football career and presumably gave him a taste of mortality. As much as he is a fan of Exley's debut, he dismisses as ``honorable failures'' his later Pages from a Cold Island and Last Notes from Home, which follow the self-mythologizing, vagabond contours of Fitzgeraldian romanticism and Hemingwayesque machismo in chronicling Exley's alcoholism and failed marriages. Misfit adds a dark, factual foundation to Exley's one lasting book. (photos, not seen)
Pub Date: Aug. 28, 1997
ISBN: 0-679-43949-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1997
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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