Ambitious, but the self-absorption wears thin.
Painfully self-conscious, often pretentious meditations on first love.
Debut author Benson’s family had a summer cabin on the shore of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a place of magical delight where every moment and sensation was treasured. The other nine months of Benson’s girlhood years were spent in Detroit, where time was suspended until life picked up again in the summer. The author regarded their summer place as home; they had family connections to it, and it has continued, she writes, to “dictate . . . what was both beautiful and true.” Benson fished, swam, and picked berries there. For many years the nameless boy with the sparkling eyes was one of the many local guys who were always around. But one summer when she was in her teens, he gave Benson a letter declaring his interest in her. She was cautious about responding, and after she did, their relationship over several long summers was loving but chaste. It effectively ended when Benson went off to college. Shortly afterward, she heard that he had married and was still living where he grew up. Now in her early 30s, Benson describes how she began regularly dreaming of the sparkling-eyed boy; in these dreams he berated her for failing to keep in touch, and she scolded him for marrying. She recalls meeting the man and his wife in later years, her parents’ divorce, her eating disorders, and her conflicted feelings about the boy and love. The carefully wrought prose evokes with conscious lyricism such perennials of the picturesque as sunsets and water views, but it turns curiously lifeless and emotionally tepid when examining the boy and her love for him. Benson works hard, but not convincingly, to explain her attraction both to permanence and to the temporality that probably shaped her feelings.
Ambitious, but the self-absorption wears thin.Pub Date: June 7, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-43321-X
Page Count: 192
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2004
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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