There’s a compelling story in this late-in-life memoir, which is at its best when Dickstein sticks to that story.
An esteemed cultural and literary critic charts the intellectual and religious paths of his early years, sometimes saying too much in the process.
In this varyingly astute and chatty memoir, Dickstein (Emeritus, English and Theater/CUNY Graduate Center; Dancing in the Dark: A Cultural History of the Great Depression, 2009, etc.) recalls his journey from Lower East Side yeshiva boy to Ivy League academic and critic. Along the way, he lost inhibitions, struggled against ingrained Jewish beliefs and customs, and contracted at least as many neuroses as he shed. Dickstein had the good fortune to come of age during the late 1950s and 1960s, when books (and eventually movies) were still at the center of cultural debate. The author was part of that conversation, and he leaves indelible portraits of his contemporaries and mentors. There’s the brilliant Lionel Trilling, who tended to wing his way through lectures; F.R. Leavis, a “slash and burn” critic cowed by his imperious wife; and the redoubtable Harold Bloom, who even then was already the smartest guy in every room. Dickstein also ably captures his own nervous embrace of secular culture, as the world of his youth proved all but impervious to assault. “As a freethinking intelligence yet a child of the ghetto, a vagrant offshoot of a venerable tradition,” he writes, “I would either learn to live with contradictions or perish under their weight.” He was both old and young; a member of the Columbia University establishment during the protests of 1968, his sympathies were squarely on the side of the students. He’s still that young man in many ways; while the book can get long-winded, especially as he recalls trips abroad, Dickstein hasn’t lost his zeal for art or ideas or his passion for writing about them.
There’s a compelling story in this late-in-life memoir, which is at its best when Dickstein sticks to that story.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2015
ISBN: 978-0871404312
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 18, 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
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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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