A vivid account of a troubled soul trudging toward stability and purpose.
The ethos of the gridiron helps a young man growing up before World War II overcome physical and psychological challenges in this earnest, anxious memoir.
Born into a poor Irish-American family in Queens, N.Y., in 1918, the author’s horizons were circumscribed by a number of factors, the most obvious being a right arm stunted at the age of 2 by a brush with polio. Defying prognoses that he would never use the arm again, he embarked in his teenage years on a grueling exercise regimen that worked so well that he became a formidable amateur boxer. (Several meticulously described fight scenes are high points of the narrative.) The lesson, distilled from bruising sandlot football games, was clear: “When things got tough, I pushed more, ran faster and, worked harder.” That attitude helped Murtagh finish high school while working full time, but not to surmount his life’s central failure—being classified 4F because of his arm and barred from military service in World War II, his generation’s great test of manhood. (He clearly never got over the disappointment, and the book’s obsessive focus on his strength and daring makes the case that he would have been a good soldier.) Murtagh’s reminiscences of his boyhood and Depression-era coming of age paint a gritty, evocative portrait of prewar working-class life, one that was equal parts hardship and hope. The second part of his memoir is stranger and darker as, after the war, he drifts into college and false career starts, briefly joins a monastery, endures panic attacks and bizarre psychosexual seizures and enters therapy, where he unearths childhood traumas and a galloping Oedipal complex. Although Murtagh’s life never quite settles down to a coherent game plan, he writes fluently and often touchingly of his battle to climb out of his mental funk through prayer and sheer determination to “put one foot in front of the other.”
A vivid account of a troubled soul trudging toward stability and purpose.Pub Date: April 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1450054874
Page Count: 182
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Nov. 18, 2010
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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