An engaging if scattershot valedictory, full of hard-won insights.
A man reflects on a richly variegated life of child rearing, career upheavals, spiritual searching and quixotic political crusades in this colorful, rambling memoir.
The author has a lot of experience under his belt, including a hardscrabble boyhood during the Great Depression, service in the Navy in World War II, a 62-year marriage that produced seven kids and a work-history that swerved improbably from sales to Catholic adult-education to a stint as a Colorado state senator. He also has a probing intellect with an idealistic, liberal bent—he was a peace activist during the Vietnam War and a campaign worker for George McGovern—and a pronounced maverick streak. (His signature issue as a state senator was the legalization of industrial hemp, an initiative that put him in harness with movie-star/activist Woody Harrelson.) Casey wrote this autobiography over 30 years in stop-and-start installments that he gave to his children as Christmas keepsakes, and the result reads like a fragmented series of diary entries. The author meanders from chronicles of everyday doings in the present to reminiscences of the past, anecdotes about long-lost friends (including a man who went to Canada to raise marijuana and start a doomsday cult), pungent commentary on youthful sexual experiences, curmudgeonly diatribes against anti-smoking Nazis and tongue-in-cheek odes to the wonders of Grape Nuts. Fortunately, Casey is a lively writer who manages to hold the reader’s interest as he rummages through this miscellany of memories and peeves. There are darkly moving passages in which he recalls wanting to end his life because of soul-killing jobs or financial reversals, and cynically comical scenes of weathering dirty tricks and stultifying stump speeches on the campaign trail. Threaded through is Casey’s persistent questioning of his Catholic beliefs and of the meaning of his life, one leads him to a compelling affirmation of family and a disillusioned but never despairing faith that “God is no more than the reality of the dignity and value of every human being.”
An engaging if scattershot valedictory, full of hard-won insights.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-1434981844
Page Count: 180
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: March 11, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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