With not much about sex but a lot about gender, here’s an acute narrative of how the clever Holland came to be so writerly.
Essayist and incidental feminist Holland (They Went Whistling, 2001, etc.) turns septuagenarian and, perforce, autobiographical, recounting the story of her first 18 years.
Caught by the pigtails, Holland’s childhood history recalls the nation’s capital during WWII, when kids were on the alert for Luftwaffe intruders and Nazi spies. It was a time when children had little more than one another for entertainment. Cuisine was standard American white bread. School was an enemy camp, and grownups were a mystery for young Barbara. Mom went barefoot and kept her nose in a book, Grandmother was a Socialist and adept at poker, and siblings were mostly an annoyance. Occupying Dad’s chair was a cold, even terrifying, stepfather. Our author displayed a preternatural attentiveness to her surroundings (as she still does). The knack of reading came to her fully formed, like an epiphany, and so did the writer’s calling. With her considerable analysis, Holland covers every variety of experience from mid-century—her discovery of books, adventurous dreams, powerful hopes and fears, dimwitted teachers, race, war, cursive handwriting, radio and—especially—the inviolable rules of belonging to one’s own gender. Boys ruled. “It was unseemly for a woman of any age to sit on leather,” we learn, “and almost indecent for a girl.” Beyond simple elegiac recollection, Holland’s memoir includes much awareness of rigidly assigned gender-based roles. Eventually, though, this little touch of Grover’s Corners in the night passes. The spirit of Holland’s youth fades away and a solemn, pensive childhood crashes down as this smart coming-of-age text comes to an end. It’s all credible and persuasive, for, as Holland notes, “gelatinous” memory, once written down, “turns to stone, right or wrong, a fact.”
With not much about sex but a lot about gender, here’s an acute narrative of how the clever Holland came to be so writerly.Pub Date: March 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-58234-525-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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