by Al Martinez ‧ RELEASE DATE: Dec. 8, 2003
Amusing irreverence gives way to a sentimental journey.
Longtime Los Angeles Times columnist and humorist Martinez (City of Angles, 1995, etc.) uses a wide range of travel experiences, mostly with family, as a format for disbursing rants, vents, intimate observations, and credit where credit’s due.
Martinez aims to be helpful. If, for instance, you’re headed to Lourdes, he suggests, “There’s not much to do unless you’re a leper.” His solution? Hit the gift shops and load up on religious kitsch. So much for travel tips. Blown reservations, surly waiters, lost luggage: all the familiar annoyances are grist for the author’s free associations, often mildly profane or scatological, that somehow wander back to elements of the same codified confession: his wife is a jewel; martinis are good but not good for you; his stepfather was an unmitigated bastard; his mother was steadfast and driven, but strangely distant. It was she, he recounts, who, when he was caught stealing as a kid, noted that he was destined to turn bad and “die in Oakland” (hence the title). Bad experiences, like a freezing sojourn in Barrow, Alaska, or being stuck in odoriferous fleabag hotels in Europe, are inevitably compared to the eternal yardstick of Korea, where the author spent more than a year as a combat Marine. On the other hand, his description of his home in Topanga Canyon, outside of LA, is so effusive it makes one want to check in as a guest. It is usually his wife, Martinez admits, who jolts him from his inertia to go out and face the world. He supplies the biases and paranoia; when, for instance, three strangers approach out of the dark while they are stranded on the road in Mexico, the author knows rape and pillage when he sees it. Instead, the men fix his car, refuse any payment, and go on their way.
Amusing irreverence gives way to a sentimental journey.Pub Date: Dec. 8, 2003
ISBN: 0-312-29087-X
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2003
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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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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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