A discerning portrait of a storied community.
A transcendent vision left dark shadows.
Founded in 1968, Auroville, in southern India, was “an aspiring utopia” aiming to “illuminate a new path for the planet.” Kapur, Whiting Creative Nonfiction grantee, was born there, as was his wife, Auralice. Both left for the U.S. as teenagers; in 2004, they returned to raise a family. Melding history, biography, and memoir, the author offers a sensitive examination of Auroville’s complex origins, tumultuous evolution, and, not least, “the very idea of utopia and the search for perfection.” Central to the narrative are Auralice’s mother and adoptive father, Diane Maes and John Walker, who died in 1986, when Auralice was 14: John, from a severe illness for which he refused medical care; Diane, by ingesting poisonous seeds. Their deaths, Kapur writes, “loomed huge in our lives” and in the community’s collective memory. Led in its early years by a Parisian-born woman whom spiritual leader Sri Aurobindo designated as the Mother, Auroville attracted idealistic individuals seeking to escape the “broken materialism” of Western culture—a world that Walker, pampered and wealthy, knew well. Although his family did not understand his commitment to Auroville, they amply funded his quest. Despite its spiritual underpinnings, the community suffered violent conflicts, intensifying after the Mother’s death in 1973. Utopia, Kapur reflects astutely, “is so often shot through with the worst forms of callousness and cruelty. Human beings—individuals, families—are mere sideshows in the quest for a perfect world; they are sacrificed at the altar of ideals.” Still, the author portrays with generosity the consuming faith that led Maes and Walker to endure suffering and to leave Auralice abandoned. “Who am I,” he writes, “to doubt that there are more things in this world than fit within my limited philosophy?” Describing the book as a “shared endeavor,” Kapur underscores Auralice’s need to make sense of the deaths that traumatized her.
A discerning portrait of a storied community.Pub Date: July 20, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3251-3
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: April 27, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2021
BOOK REVIEW
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.
The former iCarly star reflects on her difficult childhood.
In her debut memoir, titled after her 2020 one-woman show, singer and actor McCurdy (b. 1992) reveals the raw details of what she describes as years of emotional abuse at the hands of her demanding, emotionally unstable stage mom, Debra. Born in Los Angeles, the author, along with three older brothers, grew up in a home controlled by her mother. When McCurdy was 3, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Though she initially survived, the disease’s recurrence would ultimately take her life when the author was 21. McCurdy candidly reconstructs those in-between years, showing how “my mom emotionally, mentally, and physically abused me in ways that will forever impact me.” Insistent on molding her only daughter into “Mommy’s little actress,” Debra shuffled her to auditions beginning at age 6. As she matured and starting booking acting gigs, McCurdy remained “desperate to impress Mom,” while Debra became increasingly obsessive about her daughter’s physical appearance. She tinted her daughter’s eyelashes, whitened her teeth, enforced a tightly monitored regimen of “calorie restriction,” and performed regular genital exams on her as a teenager. Eventually, the author grew understandably resentful and tried to distance herself from her mother. As a young celebrity, however, McCurdy became vulnerable to eating disorders, alcohol addiction, self-loathing, and unstable relationships. Throughout the book, she honestly portrays Debra’s cruel perfectionist personality and abusive behavior patterns, showing a woman who could get enraged by everything from crooked eyeliner to spilled milk. At the same time, McCurdy exhibits compassion for her deeply flawed mother. Late in the book, she shares a crushing secret her father revealed to her as an adult. While McCurdy didn’t emerge from her childhood unscathed, she’s managed to spin her harrowing experience into a sold-out stage act and achieve a form of catharsis that puts her mind, body, and acting career at peace.
The heartbreaking story of an emotionally battered child delivered with captivating candor and grace.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-982185-82-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 30, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2022
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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