A slight but reliably amusing look at masculine insecurity and confusion.
TV funnyman on marriage, family and BMW shopping.
Black (My Custom Van: And 50 Other Mind-Blowing Essays that Will Blow Your Mind All Over Your Face, 2008, etc.), familiar to comedy fans from the sketch series The State and Stella and dozens of TV and movie appearances, presents an affecting memoir that unflinchingly details his failings as a romantic partner and father while curiously eliding his troubled childhood and professional career—aspects of the author’s life that might seem to be richer material for an autobiography. Black briefly describes his parents’ fractious relationship, his mother’s midlife embracing of lesbianism and the anxiety he felt for a younger sister with Down Syndrome, but these dramatic elements are largely ignored as Black details his callous behavior and sexual insecurities as a young man on the make and his current status as a conflicted husband and father. Readers hoping for glimpses behind the scenes of the alt-comedy boom will be disappointed, as Black barely mentions any specifics of his career as a writer and performer. However, he writes with real courage and feeling about his relationship with his wife, Martha, a moody and difficult partner with little patience for her husband’s immaturity and petulance. While Black is consistently funny and maintains his slightly detached, absurdist persona in his prose, there is authentic pain and moral confusion in his descriptions of marriage-counseling sessions, bitter arguments and threats of divorce. The author treads well-covered ground, but does so memorably and funnily.
A slight but reliably amusing look at masculine insecurity and confusion.Pub Date: Feb. 28, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4391-6785-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Dec. 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2011
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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