by Robert Andrew Powell ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 15, 2014
A brutally honest emotional odyssey.
A memoir about a middle-aged journalist who decided that running in his father's footsteps was his best shot at resurrection.
Several years ago, with his writing career tanking and a failed marriage, Powell (This Love Is Not for Cowards: Salvation and Soccer in Ciudad Juárez, 2012, etc.) happened to read a magazine article trumpeting the intoxicating running scene in Boulder, Colo. Freshly inspired, he packed up his Miami apartment, grabbed his loyal dog and hit the road intent on reinventing himself. The author recounts his personal story of how he spent a rigorous year of his life sleeping in a converted chicken coop and running among the bracing Flatirons in a bid to qualify for the prestigious Boston Marathon. Boston has always loomed large in Powell's self-loathing psyche since his father set the standard decades earlier when he successfully ran the road race as a remarkable middle-aged novice. The emotionally bereft son's complex relationship with his father runs throughout this sinewy narrative. "He never talked about work at the dinner table when I was a kid,” writes the author. “What he did with his time, on those business trips or in that office of his, was his world alone." During the course of his less-than-magical year of kinetic reinvention, Powell also began to consider Frank Shorter, former Olympian and curious Boulder running icon, as something close to an anti-father, the perfect obsessive and self-destructive example of how not to behave. No matter how far he ran, however, Powell couldn’t seem to put much distance between himself and the woman he originally walked out on or the subsequent women who, in turn, walked out on him. Pounding the pavement didn’t yield any easy answers, and the author's redemption is never a foregone conclusion. In fact, by the end of Powell's relentlessly critical self-analysis, it's clear there's still a lot more road left to be run.
A brutally honest emotional odyssey.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-544-26366-6
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: April 9, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2014
Share your opinion of this book
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
Awards & Accolades
Likes
21
Our Verdict
GET IT
Kirkus Reviews'
Best Books Of 2015
Kirkus Prize
winner
New York Times Bestseller
IndieBound Bestseller
National Book Award Winner
Pulitzer Prize Finalist
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Ta-Nehisi Coates
BOOK REVIEW
by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
More About This Book
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
Share your opinion of this book
More by Elie Wiesel
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
BOOK REVIEW
by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Hey there, book lover.
We’re glad you found a book that interests you!
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Don’t fret. We’ll find you.