by Travis Hugh Culley ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 14, 2015
A testimony to the liberating power of art.
The story of how writing became a means of healing.
Culley (The Immortal Class: Bike Messengers and the Cult of Human Power, 2001) recounts his harrowing youth in a disquieting and sometimes self-serving memoir. His father beat him, his older brother bullied him, and a minister sexually abused him, an experience that shattered him. After the abuse, he became “a boy with secrets,” never telling anyone what had happened. In school, he writes, “I refused any attempt at reading or writing….I aimed at forgetting everything that I had learned before this summer, even the images of words I knew….I began using the wrong words for things.” Nevertheless, Culley somehow managed to pass from grade to grade and even to gain admission to an arts middle school, where he blossomed in a theater program. But when he was expelled for poor academic work, his family deemed him an “illiterate loser.” After his parents divorced, the author was spared his father’s beatings; but his mother, repeatedly exasperated with him, tried to get him diagnosed as so severely disturbed that he required hospitalization. Although Culley portrays her unsympathetically, it may be difficult for some readers to blame her for looking for an explanation for her son’s erratic, rebellious behavior, which included hearing voices. Along the way, Culley was recognized by a few teachers who praised his talents, especially at the New World School of Arts, where he completed his education. “Your thoughts are invaluable,” one teacher told him, encouraging him to learn to read and write. “You need to be literate so that there is no confusion about who you are, what you want, or where you are supposed to be going.” Culley graduated with a BFA and later earned an MFA; he became a playwright, founded a short-lived theater company, and devotes himself to writing.
A testimony to the liberating power of art.Pub Date: July 14, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-345-50616-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2015
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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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
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