As Venegas portrays him in this stark, tender narrative, Jose is an extremely complicated man—longing for his children’s...
A daughter recounts a legacy of violence in this debut memoir.
One October, Jose Venegas prepared for his annual trip from Chicago, where he lived with his wife and children, to his native Mexico. As usual, he took clothing and household goods for his parents and extended family. But this time, he also bought a bulletproof vest and packed into steel trunks all the guns he had stored in the house. “Your father is never coming back,” his wife announced a few days later. For nearly 15 years, Venegas had no contact with her father, who, she learned, had killed her uncle and attempted to murder many other men. He was, she believed, violent, volatile and a coward for leaving his family unprotected. Furious with her father, she felt alienated from her mother, an evangelical Christian with no aspirations for her daughter’s future. When Venegas said she wanted to go to college, her mother told her to apply instead for a job as a cashier at Kmart: “You could drop out of school, make some good money,” she said. The author, however, followed her dream, enrolling as an economics major at the University of Illinois and studying abroad in Spain. Haunted by a past she did not understand, she gave in to her boyfriend’s urging to reconnect with her father. That reunion led to regular visits, during which she discovered how deeply imbedded he was in a culture of violence and retribution. At age 10, he blew the head off a rattlesnake with his father’s rifle; soon after, his mother pressed a knife into his hands, urging him to retaliate against a bully; two years later, she gave him a gun to use for revenge. Killing, he learned, was expected of a man, and drinking exacerbated his violence.
As Venegas portrays him in this stark, tender narrative, Jose is an extremely complicated man—longing for his children’s love, beset by regrets and seared by brutality.Pub Date: June 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-374-11731-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
PROFILES
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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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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