paper 0-8032-6382-1 A prequel to Chamoiseau’s School Days (1997), this slim, sometimes rambling, sometimes stirringly poignant account covers the novelist’s (Texaco, 1997, etc.) early childhood between first cognition and education. Writing about himself in the third person as “the boy,” Chamoiseau savors the smallest recollected details of Martinique’s rich Creole culture. From the limber patois and its incantatory intonations to irrefrangible smells and savory tastes, the island holds a spell over him that is more about the man than the boy. Yet Chamoiseau is too clear-eyed to revel in childhood’s lost sensual word. The man knows it is inextricably limned in by amorality, heedless cruelty, and intimations of mortality. There is the annual family pig, much beloved, carefully fed, honored with a name, and which still makes its way to the Christmas table. There is the constant struggle of his mother, Ma Ninotte, to stay out of debt. And when she’s deeply in debt to a particular merchant, it is the boy who is sent in her stead to do the shopping. There is the boy’s holy war, fed by rocks and matches, against insects and rats, which ends when he realizes he cannot kill an aging rat, which he calls the Old Man: “They [the rats] transformed the little boy’s nature. Beneath the killer lay the makings of someone who is incapable of doing the slightest harm to the most despicable of the green flies.” This account does suffer from the problem inherent in most recollections of earliest childhood: once you—re past the luxurious tapestry of details and burgeoning awareness, there isn—t much else beyond disparate anecdotes. It can and does get boring fast. Chamoiseau’s style is an unusual and effective blend of high and low French and Creole, but despite translator Volk’s best efforts, it doesn—t quite come across in English, seeming more precious and affected than original. This autobiographical fragment may not dim Chamoiseau’s growing reputation but it won—t illuminate it either.
Pub Date: Feb. 25, 1999
ISBN: 0-8032-1487-1
Page Count: 123
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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