Readers shouldn’t be blamed for feeling misled and slightly cheated by a book marketed as a Spalding Gray title, when only a...
The late monologist's last work, heavily reliant on eulogies delivered by friends and family at two memorial services conducted after his 2004 suicide.
“Unfinished” may be the key word to describe both Gray's life and this book. Gray committed suicide at age 62 by leaping off the Staten Island Ferry into frigid New York Harbor. But that was just the last of many suicide attempts after a terrible car accident in Ireland in June 2001 left his body and spirit broken. In the title 40-page essay, Gray recounts with typical mordancy the accident and his subsequent hospitalizations in both Ireland and New York. The volume also includes a 10-page essay written on the tenth anniversary of his first meeting his wife, Kathy Russo. The majority of the book consists of recollections and tributes delivered at two separate memorial services—one at Lincoln Center, the other in his hometown of Sag Harbor, N.Y. Those paying tribute included his widow, his older brother, Rockwell Gray and fellow performers Eric Bogosian, Laurie Anderson and Eric Stoltz. Some of those are moving and revelatory. Others are less so, at times bordering on the platitudinous. Particularly touching are the recollections of Gray’s teenaged stepdaughter Marissa, describing her struggle to live with the suicidal, broken man her father became after the car accident. Another comes from fellow author Roger Rosenblatt, who noted of Gray: “No one ever could be so sublimely miserable.” The portrait of Gray that emerges is one of an adventurous, open-hearted, troubled soul who spent his life searching for “the perfect moment.” This, he apparently never found. But this book makes us miss his easy-going wit, already preserved in previous personal essays like “Swimming to Cambodia.”
Readers shouldn’t be blamed for feeling misled and slightly cheated by a book marketed as a Spalding Gray title, when only a fraction consists of his own words.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-4861-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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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