A tour de force.
Carey’s debut is at once an Irish home-reconstruction comedy, a requiem for Fire Island friends, and a treasury of Broadway gossip, all for the love of Mammie.
In the early 1960s, 12-year-old Alice and her mother sail to Ireland to visit relatives in County Kerry. There they find Mammie’s brother Bob, a pedophile priest; cow-milking cousin DD; bog fires, excellent tea, and good whiskey. They continue on to Father Bob's meager Liverpool parish and to London, the trip’s highlight. Forty years later, Carey and her husband sell their beloved Fire Island home off Long Island and buy a “ruin” near Bantry Bay, County Cork. The main narrative covers the repair of this pre-Famine building: architect, laborers, and neighbors appear on an unpredictable schedule; New York friends visit and travel to such local sights as the Skellig Rocks. Between commutes to Ireland, Carey remembers her Catholic childhood in Queens, maintaining the present-tense narrative that gives all of her memoir such immediacy. Keeping her pugnacious father in the background (and never calling him “Dad,” always Carey), she recalls struggling in school and sneaking into weddings with her mother. When Mammie is hired as housekeeper to Broadway producer Jean Dalrymple and, later, Jed Harris, life changes dramatically. Big Alice brings in Little Alice to help after school. They love the Manhattan good life: wonderful clothes, Christmas cards from Cartier, piles of sweets from East Side bakeries, all the showbiz gossip from Homer Poupart, Dalrymple's gay assistant. Carey's affection for Homer later leads to her summering in Cherry Grove, Fire Island's gayest community. Harris, a heart of gold behind the ruthless facade, provides Alice with front row seats for Peter Pan, and helps her switch to a first-rate high school, where she does well. The sentimental subtitle belies a powerful, earthy, affectionate story whose disparate sections are knit together by Carey’s skillful characterizations, authentic dialogue, and witty observations.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60984-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
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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