Strobe light flashes of insight.
Alt-culture celeb Carver’s debut memoir asks: What comes next when you’ve lived more by the age of 20 then most people have in their whole lives?
Raised in a peripatetic manner by a Nietzschean drug-dealer father in California and an absent-minded mother in New Hampshire, the already high-strung author upshifted fast into mid-’80s adolescent freakdom. While still a teenager, she started a flirty correspondence with shock punk GG Allin and formed her own noise band, Suckdog. The first show featured a bass player and keyboardist who couldn’t play, a recording of the Bee Gees in the background and Carver ripping off her dress and screaming as she dove into the crowd of bikers and agro-punks, slapping faces at random. Over the next few years, she traveled the country with Suckdog, performing hostile, anti-art “operas” in basements and small clubs to negligible crowds, usually accompanied by her much older French husband (long story). It was all part of her inner burning, and an emptiness held at bay with movement, rage, shock: “If Suckdog isn’t good, at least we can make it unique.” Along the way Carver was a teen prostitute, occasional journalist and eventually the victim of an abusive relationship with a pseudo-celebrity neo-Nazi. In 1994, when their son Wolfgang was born with a chromosomal deletion that left him requiring constant care, she finally got off the life-as-performance-art merry-go-’round. Carver’s account is explosive, an X-ray of doomed souls and attention-seekers. “We try to get out of these cocoons and make our way down to where our bodies are. We try shoplifting and racist/sexist/ageist humor (trying to offend our way out); we get naked on stage. . . . We can’t get out. We can’t wake up.”
Strobe light flashes of insight.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-932360-94-8
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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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