A sometimes-bizarre but undeniably intriguing self-examination.
Balor’s debut memoir tells of his struggle to find his own identity and purpose in life.
The author, a 25-year-old grocery store janitor somewhere in suburban America, tells readers that he set out to write a novel, but his focus soon shifted to the journal he was writing at the same time. This yearlong chronicle begins as a stream-of-consciousness narrative, filled with seemingly random observations on such subjects as the wonder of black holes; he refers to his journal entries as “a cluster of ceaseless thoughts.” However, his quest for self-discovery ultimately becomes the book’s driving force. He constantly questioned the meaning of his life, and he sought inspiration by inquiring about his co-workers’ life-goals. Although he felt an attraction to women, he says, he had no discernible sex drive and also suffered from depression, apparently related to his parents’ divorce when he was 2. Over the course of this book, he tells of a gradually developing fear that he could be a paranoid schizophrenic. For example, inside his home, he says, he often heard voices, and he wasn’t sure whether they were from the tenants living upstairs or only in his head. He later suffered feelings of emptiness and moroseness, and although his interactions with others seemed to improve by the end of the memoir (he made some friends), he also seemed to need some more recovery time. Balor’s memoir is long and occasionally verbose, which he acknowledges, but the prose is strong and engaging throughout. Poems and snippets of short stories offset the personal narrative; they initially seem like asides but they quickly provide further insight into the author: “My aspirations are a ruse / To convince myself and acquire validation / From other plebs as lost as I.” Likewise, his worries about potential schizophrenia come across as earnest; at one point, for instance, he tells of being convinced that neighbors were listening to and regularly talking about him. The book is, at times, too metafictional, as the author sporadically discusses publishing his book, sifts through title possibilities, and even includes faux reviews from anonymous readers.
A sometimes-bizarre but undeniably intriguing self-examination.Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5320-5762-5
Page Count: 466
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2019
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
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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