by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 8, 2009
Strictly for fans who won’t mind this often-terrific storyteller not coming to a satisfactory conclusion, but rather...
Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist McMurtry follows the first volume of his memoirs, Books (2008), with a desultory account of his journey through “the scrappy, variegated world of letters.”
For the author, becoming a professional writer began with a Rice University creative-writing class—“it was bound to be better than sitting in math class, watching the calculus sail over my head”—but did not take off until his transfer to North Texas State Teachers College. Though more or less chronologically arranged, the rest of the narrative is surprisingly fitful and somewhat artless. McMurtry hints that Rhino Ranch (2009), the last of his novels devoted to Duane Moore of The Last Picture Show (1966), will be his farewell to fiction, and this narrative has its own autumnal feel to it: “In old age one writes, if at all, what one can.” Moving among the antiquarian book trade (his longtime sideline), literature and Hollywood (the subject of his next projected memoir), the slapdash organization might have been pardonable if not for a string of abortive vignettes. McMurtry piques interest, for instance, in observing that he once sat at dinner with DC hostess Pamela Harriman, “the greatest horizontale of her era,” but the author doesn’t provide the slightest detail beyond that statement. Many readers will wish he had spent more time on hellraisers James Dickey, Willie Morris and George Garrett; many of the other brief portraits—Wallace Stegner, Susan Sontag, Ken Kesey and Norman Mailer—read as if rendered with a dry eye. Thankfully, McMurtry isn’t too impressed with himself either. He points to an eight-year fallow period in which he disliked his prose following Terms of Endearment (1975). His brand of “old-fashioned realism,” he writes, has usually failed to impress critics—with the notable exception of Lonesome Dove (1985). Now, at the end of the trail, he prides himself on being a man of letters, neither rich nor poor, and sometimes reaching artistic heights in the bargain.
Strictly for fans who won’t mind this often-terrific storyteller not coming to a satisfactory conclusion, but rather ceasing, in exhaustion, from his prolific labors.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4391-5993-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2009
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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 Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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