A dryly witty, spirited memoir of an abandoned life of drink and what it might have cost.
The affinity of writers to liquor is legendary, even a cliché. Departing from the usual, New York Times columnist Scoblic presents a memoir of her happy sobriety.
The author’s coming-of-age story follows her life on the wagon now, as well as dates with old John Barleycorn in the past. She tells of losing her sobriety and yielding, in her youth, to the likes of Jack Daniels, Johnnie Walker and Captain Morgan. The young drinker from a secure home in upstate New York began her tipsy ways in high school. She became a Columbia undergrad and law-school dropout working, in those days, for the New Republic and, later, during her more drunken days, for Reader’s Digest. Scoblic saw herself as hip and cool, but despite toxic girlfriends and reckless guys, the parties were really miserable. Then, one clear day, she declared her independence from her addiction to alcohol. The conversion to teetotalism included, as Scoblic reports, her own 12-step dance, some overeating, odd spending sprees and a bit of financial distress. As she climbed out of the bottle, she learned how to depart from corporate happy hours and how to deal with the real world, and she found understanding and supportive love and marriage. Whether she writes of being manhandled by Maker’s Mark or offers her frank take on theological matters, Scoblic’s testament to life on the wagon is pertinent and raffish, marked by considerable candor and humor.
A dryly witty, spirited memoir of an abandoned life of drink and what it might have cost.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8065-3429-9
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Citadel/Kensington
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2011
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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