A memorable study in contrasts, recounted with understanding and verve.
Based on memory, parental revelations, published material and uncovered correspondence, New Yorker and New York Times contributor Stille (The Sack of Rome: How a Beautiful European Country with a Fabled History and a Storied Culture Was Taken Over by a Man Named Silvio Berlusconi, 2006, etc.) considers his forebears.
The author’s mother, Elizabeth, was a bright, pretty girl, a bit flighty in her youth. Her father was a self-made, well-regarded, WASP-y law professor. Stille’s grandfather was a clever, philandering dentist, and his name, Kamenetzki in the Russian shtetl, became Cammenschi in prewar Italy. The family immigrated to New York when Mussolini enacted anti-Jewish racial laws. After service in Italy during the war, their son, Mikhail (Misha to the family), found his calling as the American correspondent for the leading Italian newspaper. His pen name, “Stille,” became the family name. At a party (for Truman Capote), Elizabeth encountered Misha (aka Ugo Stille), prompting her to leave her feckless husband for her new, sophisticated suitor. The author examines the relationship between these charming and brainy people from disparate upbringings, noting how she was neat and organized, while he was irascible and sloppy. There were sexual tensions in their world of literati and hipsters, and Elizabeth struggled mightily with her decision to stay in the marriage, which often descended into separations. The author presents a history of considerable scope, exploring in the process the relationship between life and literature: “Life is infinitely complex and messy, and literature works the opposite way: through the distilling and fixing of things into a limited number of words and pages that then (one hopes) takes on a life and meaning of its own.” Though Stille’s rare stabs at humor may be a bit wan, he depicts the histrionic partners in a truly mixed marriage with sharp insight and affection.
A memorable study in contrasts, recounted with understanding and verve.Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-374-15742-5
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2012
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
