“The secret of the universe is that we do have to take control of our own lives,” was, Dudgeon claims, Binchy’s lifelong...
An upbeat biography of the prolific, much-loved Irish writer.
Binchy (1940-2012) wrote about what she knew: love, friendship and community in small Irish towns like Dalkey, where she grew up in a conservative Catholic family. Dudgeon (Neverland: J.M. Barrie, the du Mauriers, and the Dark Side of Peter Pan, 2009, etc.) follows his subject’s hard-won striving to “discover, enhance, and believe” in her own worth. As a child, Binchy suffered from “a crippling self-consciousness” due to her weight; she responded by developing “a self-deprecating brand of humour” that served her well as an adult. As Dudgeon tells it, Binchy’s life was marked by a series of epiphanies. After a student exchange trip to France—her first time out of Ireland—she realized that her worldview was provincial and vowed to travel. At University College Dublin, from which she graduated with only a pass (the lowest rank possible), she discovered burgeoning feminism, beatniks and existentialism. Sartre became her “mentor and life guide.” On a train one day, she took her first drink of alcohol, which enhanced “her rapid-flow delivery of stories, anecdotes and observations on life.” She “rarely lost control” but developed a fondness for gin. Another epiphany occurred during a trip to Israel, where she worked on a kibbutz and took a side trip to Jerusalem to see where the Last Supper had taken place. What she found was a cave, a sight that shocked her so profoundly that she immediately relinquished her Catholic faith. Working as a teacher, Binchy became a writer by accident when her father submitted her travel letters to the Irish Independent. Later, she was offered a job as women’s editor of the Irish Times, for which she wrote for 32 years. Fiction came later, with immediate acclaim.
“The secret of the universe is that we do have to take control of our own lives,” was, Dudgeon claims, Binchy’s lifelong mantra, and he captures her ebullience and drive in this anecdotal biography.Pub Date: July 22, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-250-04714-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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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