An effervescent yet self-effacing tale of a youngster who viewed a library as an all-you-can-eat buffet—and greedily gorged.
The Washington Post Book World’s Pulitzer-winning book critic recalls in evocative prose his nerdy youth in Lorain County, Ohio.
Dirda (Readings: Essays and Literary Entertainments, 2000) grew up in the home of a bored and bitter steelworker who could not understand why his son’s nose was permanently parked in a book. Still, the elder Dirda emerges as a positive force in this marvelous memoir, nowhere more poignantly than when he advised his son, at the time feeling overmatched at Oberlin, that he just needed to work harder. Michael did, and graduated with highest honors in English. The story of the author’s life is an account of the myriad books he read, of the social consequences exacted by his nerdiness, of the adults who influenced him, of the young men he befriended, of the young women he lusted after and pursued, at times clownishly. Virtually every page is crowded with allusions to texts, accounts of how specific writers influenced him, and quotations. (Dirda was an inveterate memorizer, though his memory occasionally fails him here; he misquotes the lyrics to Mighty Mouse’s theme song and misidentifies the author of “Thanatopsis.”) As a boy he favored adventure stories; Bomba and Tarzan were a couple of jungle favorites. In junior high he met a charismatic teacher who challenged him with books that few young adolescents would today attempt, e.g., Crime and Punishment. He read the way starving omnivores eat, from Shakespeare to Dale Carnegie, from Thoreau to Lloyd C. Douglas, from Clifton Fadiman to Ayn Rand. A high-school French teacher fed him other books like bon-bons and took him and some others on an 8,000-mile car trip one summer. With puberty came clumsiness and sexual silliness (amusingly related), then it was off to nearby Oberlin, where he learned about music and art and hard work.
An effervescent yet self-effacing tale of a youngster who viewed a library as an all-you-can-eat buffet—and greedily gorged.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-393-05756-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2003
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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