An engaging and often darkly funny memoir. Life begins at 40 for the author, who got a late start on adulthood and had a...
A memoir about how sobriety helped a recovering alcoholic belatedly become an adult.
Title aside, this isn’t a how-to book but more of a cautionary tale. As Tea (Valencia, 2008, etc.) writes, “I am someone whose path to adulthood is not a clear A to B, a straight line through life. My life is more like A, B, back to A, but it’s a different A this time, and now B looks so different from my time back at A—and whoa, here’s C, what a trip! I’m a grown-up!” It’s a life that has encompassed marriage to a woman after a life of often passionate, frequently misguided relationships with much younger men; of finding a place of her own after living in party houses; of teaching writing in college though she never graduated; of earning a living through writing and speaking that she once did almost for free. And of prostitution, phone sex, meth and heroin—though she treads lightly in this book on those areas. She writes, as she says, with “the dark domestic humor of a satanic Erma Bombeck,” and this is thematic territory that others have explored before her. As the memoir plays chronological hopscotch, some chapters might have fared better as stand-alone essays (particularly “How to Break Up,” which comes after she has settled down, married and her breakups are presumably behind her), and some of the concepts seem a little forced (“Hail the breakover, a breakup-inspired makeover”), but generally, the personality of her writing carries readers through. There’s also an inspirational quality to the way a life that once seemed so wayward (even to the author) has worked out so well.
An engaging and often darkly funny memoir. Life begins at 40 for the author, who got a late start on adulthood and had a wild time getting there.Pub Date: Jan. 27, 2015
ISBN: 978-0142181195
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Plume
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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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