A heartfelt book about an inspiring model of wisdom, self-awareness, and thoughtful engagement with the world.
The story of a man who exalted personal responsibility for systemic change.
In this combination of memoir and political critique, Jensen (Journalism/Univ. of Texas; Arguing for Our Lives: A User’s Guide to Constructive Dialog, 2013, etc.) pays homage to Jim Koplin (1933-2012), his mentor, friend, and lover. The two met in 1988, when Jensen was a University of Minnesota graduate student researching feminist responses to pornography, and Koplin, a volunteer at the Organizing Against Pornography office, agreed to be interviewed. Despite their 25-year age difference, the men felt an immediate bond, which they discovered stemmed from traumatic pasts. Koplin’s father had been violent; Jensen’s youth, which likely involved sexual abuse, was so troubled that he had developed dissociative amnesia. They both felt “not-normal,” recognizing similar quirks in each other as their friendship deepened. Although Koplin resisted being called Jensen’s “intellectual guru,” he was clearly more than an academic mentor, offering guidance through long conversations and abundant letters. Jensen admits that he was “inadequately prepared” for graduate work: naïve, not well-read, and unable to think critically about political, social, ethical, and environmental issues. On the subject of sex and gender, for example, he had been “an apologist for patriarchy” until Koplin pushed him to “think in terms of hierarchy and power” and leave his “liberal bubble” for “a more radical, and honest, analysis of myself and the world.” Portraying himself as “a pretty typical American,” Jensen believed that a “conventional narrative of U.S. benevolence” justified foreign policy, until Koplin gave him a “crash course” about U.S. relations in the Middle East. The author praises Koplin's “comprehensive and consistent radical left/feminist/anti-racist/ecological politics,” his frugal lifestyle, and his rejection of consumerism.
A heartfelt book about an inspiring model of wisdom, self-awareness, and thoughtful engagement with the world.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-59376-618-4
Page Count: 228
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
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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