The life of an immigrant family, reassembled with the contents of one man's study. After the recent deaths of his parents, the task of sorting through his father's copious papers fell to Orlove (Environmental Studies/Univ. of California, Davis). Rather than merely reading the contents, he decided to write a book about them. The result is the story both of Robert Orlove and of his son Ben's research and writing process: the first tentative forays of the son into the father's inner sanctum; Ben's eventual removal of the journals, letters, drawings, and pictures to his own home; the plan he laid out for structuring them into a book. Ben decided that the best way of presenting the study would be to divide it into thematic chapters corresponding to the different material he found. ``Mother-book'' describes a notebook Robert wrote about his mother; ``Brother-mail'' the letters of Robert's inventor- brother. Instead of a linear narrative, Ben treats the reader to a glimpse of what it was like to rummage through Robert's things, coming up with small, oddly shaped pieces of an enormous, incomplete puzzle. The structure is inspired, but it's not matched by Ben's analyses of what he finds. He speculates wildly about the significance of various objects—for example, his mother's sheet music of ``You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby'' suggests to him that she might have been having a flirtation with another man, because its tone is different from the other songs she collected. Ben simply accepts as justified, however, Robert's dislike of his own father, rather than delving further into this complex association. Given the shaky quality of what analysis he does provide, Orlove might have done better to transcribe more and let his readers come to their own conclusions. Like the study itself, some true gems mixed in with a lot of scrap paper. (30 photos, not seen)
Pub Date: March 31, 1995
ISBN: 0-87745-490-6
Page Count: 365
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1995
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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