by Andrew Sheehan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 11, 2001
Enough ache here to fill more than a lifetime, albeit with reconciliation at the end and a “father who wondered at the...
Like father, like son. Newspaperman Sheehan’s potent memoir finds a lot of unfortunate parallels between his own and his father’s lives: drinking gone sour, marriages abandoned, a furious pursuit of freedom that turned both remote, then solitary.
Sheehan always remembers running after the love of his father. George was a doctor, son of a New York Irish doctor, who worked dawn to dark to get beyond what he saw as the confines of his heritage. He was an absence to his 12 children, and Andrew, smack in the middle, acutely felt the lack of attention. Sheehan tries to get a grasp of the situation by exploring how his father’s sense of insecurity and inadequacy might have made him unapproachable. The two shared time together, but never enough. And there was alcohol: “Even in temperate Irish households, alcohol was always a presence, a specter from the past kept at bay, in hope that if no one acknowledges it, the beast will just someday roll over and die.” For neither man was it so temperate. Worse still, when George gained fame as a running guru in the 1960s, he started to pursue women, forsaking his family. His mother would always accept him back, but after he had entered into the family’s midst, he would take what he wanted and then leave again. Sheehan follows along in his father’s footsteps: a runner, a writer, an escaper from responsibility and from his own emotional life. As the son gathers the rubble of his life, George discovers he has inoperable prostate cancer. He wakes up to the glory of his family, and the pages devoted to this time are heartbreaking in their beauty and unadorned brevity.
Enough ache here to fill more than a lifetime, albeit with reconciliation at the end and a “father who wondered at the beauty of his son and could claim no influence.”Pub Date: Sept. 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-385-33561-X
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Delacorte
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2001
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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 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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