Wilkinson learned well from his mentor and brings that emotive, sympathetic bearing, beautiful and melancholy, with great...
A lovely tribute to novelist and New Yorker editor William Maxwell (1908–2000), who was for many years a mentor to Wilkinson (A Violent Act, 1993, etc.), as well as a neighbor, a father figure, and a friend.
“I derived my identity from Maxwell,” states Wilkinson, though he admits later that he also was shaped by his father, a man of many foibles with whom he failed to make the elementary connection that he had with Maxwell. There is a wonderful clear-headedness here, despite all the emotions swarming about. The older man would have appreciated Wilkinson’s uncluttered exposition of their relationship, for Maxwell was a writer of enormous elegance in work charged with feeling: “A writer should hold nothing back. Everything you have is never more than enough for the purpose at hand,” he believed. He was also a skillful editor: Wilkinson depicts Maxwell bringing imagination, receptivity, and sympathy, as well as intimacy with the technical possibilities, to the job of “understanding what a writer is trying to say and helping him say it if he needs the help.” Employing long quotes, Wilkinson draws a noble portrait of Maxwell and his wife, Emmy. He creates an enduring testimony to their long friendship, down to the last days when his affection for Maxwell was “worn like a garment over a sadness that was part loneliness and part despair and anger at being deprived of the one man I loved.” The element of catharsis is never gratuitous, but used to further the reader’s appreciation of Maxwell and of a relationship between two men that rings of Maxwell’s words: “You don’t thank people for being your friend, you thank God for your good fortune in having them as a friend.”
Wilkinson learned well from his mentor and brings that emotive, sympathetic bearing, beautiful and melancholy, with great immediacy to this homage.Pub Date: April 4, 2002
ISBN: 0-618-12301-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2002
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
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
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