An emotional demonstration that Humpty Dumpty can be put together again. (Illustrations)
Stylistically innovative memoir of the author’s father, who killed himself in 1974 when she was five.
For her debut, Oliver fashions a form that fits her subject. Because she did not remember her father—indeed, went through most of her life without even being very curious about him—and because he shot himself in a primitive dirt-floor cabin in New Mexico leaving behind very few possessions, she began with a short list of only five specific items that he’d owned or that in some way told part of his story. Hers is a voyage of discovery: she interviewed relatives, cold-called a number of her father’s former acquaintances, visited the sites where he’d lived and died, discovered many old photographs and a pathetic journal with drawings and bad poems as dark as the grave, viewed videos of his 1961 appearance on the G. E. College Bowl representing Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where he’d studied to be an architect, a profession he pursued only fitfully. By the end, Oliver’s list of items has grown to 33. She chronicles the dissolution of her parents’ marriage—and her own. (She became romantically involved with one of her father’s former friends.) She rehashes childhood sexual abuse from a beery man her mother was living with. She describes entering therapy. Oliver’s structure is part scrapbook, part narrative, part mosaic, part meta-memoir. She provides snippets of dialogue, old photographs, transcriptions of e-mail, photocopies of pages from her father’s journal, newspaper clippings, drawings—full meals of narrative followed by bite-sized snacks. She also discovers there was much to admire about her father: he was a fine friend; he had a bright, inventive mind; he was attractive and amusing. But when he lost interest in his architecture career, he drifted. At the end, virtually alone near Taos, he was associating with hard people and selling hard drugs.
An emotional demonstration that Humpty Dumpty can be put together again. (Illustrations)Pub Date: Aug. 5, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-34152-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 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
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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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