A story of sleeplessness told through lyrical bursts of prose, science, fleeting thoughts, and haphazard punctuation.
Atlanta-based novelist Butler (There Is No Year, 2011, etc.) attempts to comprehend the bewildering “aimless mental spin” resulting from a consecutive stream of restless nights. Conveyed through footnotes and streamlined paragraphs, the author recollects his troubled, paranoid childhood terrorized by Stephen King novels and sleepless nights spent “rubbing along walls” for seams in the house. When sleep came, it was accomplished by contorting himself beneath his parents’ bed and was often accompanied by night terrors, a horrific condition believed to be inherited from his mother, who documented the family in handwritten journals. He describes his present-day struggle to achieve slumber as a multitiered ritual rife with minute physical nuances each harboring the potential to allow him either a good night’s sleep or one spent writhing in frustration. Once awake, however, his “busy brain” actively nursed a buzzing Internet obsession with search engines or Facebook, “jumbling through nothing, staring at images of head after new head.” Particularly harrowing are sections detailing the author’s unimaginable near-six-day stretch without sleep and the eerie visions of an ominous male phantom lurking outside his bedroom window. Exasperatingly ineffective trials with sleeping pills, hypnosis videos and a walk-in clinic evaluation only compounded Butler’s dilemma. A slick combination of dreamscapes, stream-of-consciousness writing and referential scientific data on the compelling origins of insomnia disorders coalesce in a narrative that’s initially intimidating and demanding in its unorthodox delivery yet becomes compelling once Butler establishes a narrative cadence. A weird, waking-dream of a memoir superbly illustrating the relentless inner spin of the insomniac.
Pub Date: Oct. 18, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-199738-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Perennial/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Aug. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2011
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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