When it’s “time to shove off,” as she says, you’ll want to be there to lend Murphy a hand onto any coach of exit she chooses.
Lovely memoir of a roving life, full of dread and great affection.
Murphy (“a cross little weasel”) was born into privation and poverty that are still with her after 75 years. Yet the memories held in these pages resound not with bitterness, but with spunk and wonder. Her story starts innocently enough, in Ireland after WWI, with tales of gypsies and card-playing, singing and superstitions, rituals and herbal cures, carbolic soap and childhood mortality, and concocting sins for confession. The author creates for readers a deeply atmospheric world, hard but vital. There came a time when her mouth was one too many to feed, and she had to make her own way in the world. She met a man at a dance (a venue for socializing that gives the period a very specific gravity), got pregnant, got married. And she stayed in that marriage, to a man who would cheat on and beat her: maybe because she was Catholic, maybe so that her nine children would have a semblance of family, maybe because she just thought it was the right thing to do. Security would not be the couple’s fortune. Seeking domestic employment, they were footloose; twice the children had to be sent into foster care when their mother was sick and their father too feckless to care. They endured evictions and bailiffs smashing the furniture, episodes of English bigotry toward the Irish, many nights when they were lucky to have scallions, bread, and margarine for dinner. Their children had to grow up fast, learning to dodge the stinging familial bullets amidst the throat-tightening displays of love and protectiveness. Threaded throughout the narrative, gnawing like a rat, is the lung cancer whose discovery, in 1999, led the author to leave her husband and their by-then 50-year marriage.
When it’s “time to shove off,” as she says, you’ll want to be there to lend Murphy a hand onto any coach of exit she chooses.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-33791-4
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 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
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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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