by Allen Wheelis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1999
Now in his 80s, Wheelis offers a sometimes pungent memoir of his boyhood and later life. Though his mother lives to be nearly 100 and figures most prominently in this brief volume (Wheelis recycles some incidents from his earlier memoir, The Life and Death of My Mother, 1992), it’s his father, who died young, whose portrait emerges most strongly. A domineering man, Morris Wheelis ruled the household from his sickbed on the enclosed porch of the family home in San Antonio, Tex., where he spent years laid up with tuberculosis. In order to teach his young son a lesson in responsibility, one summer Mr. Wheelis made young Allen trim the lawn—blade by blade, on his hands and knees, with a hand-held razor, because the family was too poor to have a mower. It took him virtually an entire summer, a summer he longed to spend playing ball with his friends. It was one of Allen’s earliest lessons in longing—for it is longing that this psychoanalyst believes is at the core of our being, it is the “hidden reality.” Wheelis’s account of his early life is is peppered with viscerally felt scenes. But the account of his later life, of his second marriage (his first he passes over with a mere mention), of the impossibility of achieving a true union with his wife, of her pursuit of him and his efforts to escape into work, is inherently more diffuse and pale. He says of his wife, Ilse, “Herself a psychoanalyst, she had a gift for intimacy, and when the day’s work was done wanted only to be with me, while I, hurting still from an ancient wound, was driven to search for a meaning that would heal the wound. . . .” Still, the memoir ends on a note of affirmation of the centrality of love—but it lacks the emotional force of the earlier scenes of yearning.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-393-04783-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1999
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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