Masterful: a refreshing break from our tell-all world.
The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet’s stylish coming-of-age memoir.
Born in 1927, the son of a Presbyterian pastor, Merwin (The Ends of the Earth, 2004, etc.) grew up poor in Pennsylvania. His father was harsh and distant, rarely speaking to him unless a disciplinary issue needed addressing. (The author’s mother is shadowy, largely absent from this account.) Merwin worked his way through Princeton, where he discovered modern poetry: García Lorca, Stevens, Eliot and Pound. He wasn’t the only budding poet in Tigertown; he waited tables with none other than Galway Kinnell. Merwin captures the seriousness of that period, recalling his shock when the atom bomb was dropped on Japan: “I felt a wave of cold, then of disbelief and denial, reactions which have affected the world ever since that evening.” After college, Merwin married and found work as a private tutor. His lovely text offers more than autobiography; it’s also a setpiece that evokes a more gracious era, in which those in the leisure class seemed to enjoy their leisure. In the summer, Merwin’s tutoring gig took him to Europe. There, he flirted with older women, mixed with an Irish novelist who “liked his red wine at all hours of the day,” witnessed an attempted suicide and listened to his intellectual interlocutors hold forth on everything from Franco to fine art. Merwin offers less insight when writing about himself. He seems, for example, oblivious to the Freudian reading invited by his constrained descriptions of women and marriage. (His first marriage was “thoughtless,” his wife “agreeable, equable, and attractive.”) Readers accustomed to memoirs that spill every gratuitous, salacious detail might grow frustrated with this mannerly approach.
Masterful: a refreshing break from our tell-all world.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-59376-072-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Shoemaker & Hoard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
