Sparely written, often casual, but powerful.
From award-winning journalist Powers, a debut memoir considering a youth lost to a firearms accident.
Misadventures involving “loaded guns, unsupervised, rambunctious teenage boys” still occur today, yet as related here his story is redolent of chaotic mid-1980s Brooklyn, scene of the author’s childhood. Powers’s hard-working mother, a nurse and Army reservist, kept several handguns at home, not realizing that her son liked taking them out to impress his friends. One day in 1988, unaware that her .38 revolver was loaded, 14-year-old Kemp shot his best friend Henry in the face, killing him. “Beyond all reason,” Henry’s parents forgave him and declined to press charges; despite the district attorney’s anger, he was sentenced to only a year of counseling. Understandably, the incident has haunted Powers ever since. But The Shooting is also a subdued evocation of a vanished Brooklyn, post-disco but pre-gentrification, a place of temptations and urban dangers epitomized by street gangs and vigilante Bernie Goetz. The author and his peers were acquainted with vandalism and random assaults, but they also enjoyed the street culture of slot cars, comic books, early rap, video games, and break dancing. Enrolled in a “magnet school” gifted program, Powers enjoyed friendships across racial boundaries, but tensions increased following a black youth’s death following a mob assault in Queens. He recalls “Howard Beach” as the hostile rallying cry of Brooklyn’s Italian-Americans against the perceived invasion of blacks and Puerto Ricans, and his youthful self perfectly perceived the uneasy lure of weapons: “A gun alleviated the need to roll ten or twenty people deep when venturing out at night.” Powers became an aggressive, success-obsessed journalist with a self-destructive streak, which he now recognizes as a labyrinthine atonement for his crime. “Even at fourteen years old, Henry . . . was walking a righteous path. For a while, at least, so was I.” He concludes by noting that had the shooting occurred today he’d be handed a mandatory minimum sentence.
Sparely written, often casual, but powerful.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-56858-320-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2004
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
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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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