As the finality of the title indicates, Simone de Beauvoir considers this the last volume of her autobiography, a summing-up. At the outset she promises to consider in terms of its "themes" a life which in the previous four volumes (Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter, The Prime of Life, Force of Circumstance, A Very Easy Death) she has related more in terms of its events. It is a promise she never fulfills. This book is a pleasant but somehow centerless compendium of odds and ends from the ten years since the publication of Force of Circumstance — new and continued friendships, deaths, dreams, fond gossip, books read, films and plays seen, works written (here explained and defended against critics), travels touristic and political, feminist and socialist ideas — prefaced by a more forceful but still unevenly interesting essay on the provocative question, "Why am I myself?". Her meditations on this subject consist of brief recapitulations of the stages of her life from the perspective of Sartrean psychology (the conflict between one's sense of subject and one's treatment by others as an object) and of the related question of free will: to what extent is a human being formed by circumstance — parents, social class, friendships, schooling — and to what extent did Beauvoir shape herself?. She traces with satisfaction the persistence from her youngest years of a stubborn will and an "eagerness for knowledge" that have guided her through circumstance; but she never really comes to terms with the question. There are flashes of intensity and wonder — especially in Beauvoir's account of her relationship with a young woman who is obviously an intellectual adopted daughter, perhaps because Sylvie gives Beauvoir the grasp of the future which old age by her own testimony lacks, and without which she has, alas, loosened her grip on the present.
Pub Date: Aug. 23, 1974
ISBN: 1569249814
Page Count: 476
Publisher: Putnam
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1974
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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