A great-hearted book of tenderness and brutality.
The boldly intimate memoir of an English Gypsy's struggle to define himself and his sexuality outside the bounds of traditional Romany culture.
Walsh (Gypsy Boy, 2012) grew up in the rough-and-tumble world of Gypsies, where men "oozed testosterone and masculinity" and "drank, argued over women and produced sons." From the time he was a young boy, though, he knew he was different. His father wanted to transform him into a fighter worthy of the family name. However, "thrashing the stuffing" out of boys "just for the sake of some misguided sense of honour” made no sense at all. Tired of both his father's inability to accept him for what he was and of the secret sexual abuse he endured from his father's brother, Walsh ran away from home at 15. He went to live with his lover Caleb, who protected him from the Gypsy thugs his father hired to track them down. Walsh fled to Leeds and then Manchester, struggling to build a life among the "Gorgias." His relationship with Caleb did not survive, but other friends he made in the gay community helped him find his way. Against all odds, Walsh earned a college degree and also gained a coveted place at the Guildhall School of Drama in London. But he missed his family and worried for the safety of his youngest brother, who he feared would be molested by his unscrupulous uncle. Eventually, he exposed his father's brother for the predator he was. Neither Walsh's father nor his fighter-brother, however, could ever fully accept that homosexuality was part of their macho family heritage. Sadly aware that he would never be able to "go back to the family home again," Walsh nevertheless continued to love them from the new home he had made for himself outside the Gypsy community.
A great-hearted book of tenderness and brutality.Pub Date: March 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-250-02187-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
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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