An occasionally compelling memoir hampered by its incoherent structure.
A life of petty crime escalates into black-market dealings and murder in this debut memoir.
Maktari had a mother who abandoned him and a manipulative, uncaring father, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that he found himself underperforming in school, committing various crimes (including impersonating a Saudi prince), and living on the street for a period of time. This debut memoir isn’t written in strict chronological order, and the author covers up many details of his life to remain anonymous, so it’s difficult to piece together a clear timeline. But his criminal activity eventually led to a stint in prison and, once he got out, the more serious criminal underground. He didn’t ask his bosses many questions, as he was happy to have money, but he writes that in exchange for his obedience, he wound up having to kill people. He often alludes to the fact that his marriage suffered and eventually collapsed as a result of his lifestyle, but he gives few details, instead focusing on business. Specifically, he writes about the black-market gold trade, which ultimately led him to a surreal encounter in the Syrian desert with a mysterious royal and what Maktari describes as “tons” of gold. The memoir begins in a straightforward fashion, but by the end, it grows so splintered that it’s difficult to keep track of the story—which, in any case, may or may not be true. Although the author makes attempts at accepting accountability, it may be difficult for readers to feel sympathy for him. The memoir’s repeated use of derogatory language toward women doesn’t further its cause, nor do the last pages, which descend into ramblings about the world’s uncertain economic future.
An occasionally compelling memoir hampered by its incoherent structure.Pub Date: June 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482790740
Page Count: 148
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 30, 2013
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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