A thoughtful, poignant, and candid memoir perfect for Conroy fans.
An educational consultant and writer recalls his friendship with the late novelist.
Schein (Famous All Over Town, 2014, etc.) first met Pat Conroy (1945-2016) in early 1961 when both were students in Beaufort, South Carolina. Schein was a self-professed cheater who hated school while Conroy was the social and athletic star everyone adored. Yet both were also outsiders. Though a South Carolina native, Schein was a Jew in a majority Christian South, and Conroy was a “military brat” who, until arriving in Beaufort, had moved every year he had been in school. The pair bonded in high school and then deepened their attachment after college when they returned to Beaufort “to dodge the draft and to teach, in that order.” They soon discovered that their anti-racist beliefs and civil rights activism put them at odds with the conservative white power structure in Beaufort, including the board of education. In 1970, the year Schein went to graduate school at Harvard, Conroy lost his job as a teacher at an all-black school for daring to change a curriculum that emphasized obedience to authority rather than learning. While Schein continued his professional pursuits in education, Conroy left teaching to write. His autobiographical first novel, The Great Santini (1976), about the relationship between a son and his abusive military father, made Conroy a household name. But fame and the repressed rage he harbored against his father transformed the mild-mannered Conroy into an alcoholic “word-sniper” and “verbal hitman” who took cruel shots at everyone, including Schein. In 1990, Schein refused to publish a story in a school magazine by Conroy’s stepdaughter that discussed the sexual abuse she had endured from her birth father. Their friendship ended, but the two continued to talk “about each other all the time.” The men reconciled 15 years later and remained close until Conroy died. Honest in its portrayal of both Conroy and Schein’s own conflicted feelings toward the novelist, the lucid narrative deftly explores the complexities of a lifelong friendship.
A thoughtful, poignant, and candid memoir perfect for Conroy fans.Pub Date: Sept. 3, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-948924-13-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: June 29, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
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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