A gem of a book.
An English jewelry designer’s singularly engaging account of how a childhood pastime that involved making things by hand evolved into an artistic career.
The son of bohemian parents, Monroe spent his childhood growing up “between the woods and river in the wilds of Suffolk,” where he fought, fished and hunted with his siblings. He also drew and learned how to make things like counterfeit coins, go-carts and weapons to use against neighborhood boys from discarded pianos, furniture, bicycles, and other assorted odds and ends. In this book, Monroe interweaves stories from this idyllic childhood—as well as his more troubled adolescence and early adulthood—with meditations on the creative process that has since brought him international fame. Memory and artistic idea are inextricably bound in every piece he creates. The remembrance of a family mystery involving the death of a grandfather who loved to garden found its way into a delicate chrysanthemum wrought in gold. A story involving the teenage Monroe’s first tentative encounters with desire became interwoven into a collection of necklace charms meant to “evoke the wind in your hair and young love and escape, and behind all that carefree joy, something more elusive.” Experiences with love and loss—one belonging to Monroe and the other to Queen Victoria—became the inspiration behind a golden, heart-shaped locket containing a single bejeweled lovebird. Illustrated throughout with photographs and sketches of the projects he discusses, Monroe’s book is more than just an account of an artist’s past and its relationship to his work. It is also an extended essay that explores ways of seeing the world—especially the natural world—and how that vision gets translated into meaningful objects.
A gem of a book.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-4088-4118-1
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2014
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
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