Written at a fever pitch, this valuable memoir is not about whining as much as it is about surviving paternal insanity.
Surrealistically graphic memoir of a childhood dominated by a violently abusive father and timid mother.
Though childhood-abuse memoirs are abundant, Anderson’s is distinct in its minute descriptions of the intense physical and psychological torture he endured, which his helpless mother witnessed. Inspired by a letter he received from his mother asking about her and her husband’s parenting faults, Anderson lays out more than 60 specific incidents, most committed by his father. They range from somewhat insensitive (as a teen he was limited to watching only G-rated films) to shockingly violent. These disturbing accounts include house-wrecking wrestling matches, stealing money their son earned at his after-school jobs, threats to stop him from attending public school despite his superior grades, control of all his possessions except a comb, pen and an empty wallet, and rituals of sexual humiliation. One of six siblings in a family ruled by a tyrannical ex-military officer and his second wife, Anderson paints a harrowing portrait of the deleterious effects of dysfunctional parenting. He experienced brief respites when he was allowed to live for weeks with his older brother’s family and the family of his best friend. Both of these households offered to let him complete his adolescence in their loving homes, but Anderson was afraid to accept due to his fear of his father’s wrath. Written as one long accusation, there are tedious stretches where the reader can readily predict the father’s next outrage against his son. Yet Allen provides italicized patches of self-talk steeped in thick irony and sardonic comedy, with scenarios and stock phrases lifted from gangster films or spy thrillers.
Written at a fever pitch, this valuable memoir is not about whining as much as it is about surviving paternal insanity.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2010
ISBN: 978-1453785010
Page Count: 392
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 17, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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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