A sequence of autobiographical essays by poet Rickel (Creative Writing/Univ. of Arizona) kicks off the new series “Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiographies” with an elliptical whimper. Rickel offers only a few biographical specifics: he grew up in placid Tempe, Ariz., in the ’60s, scarcely traveled, and moved to Tucson, where he lives with his longtime partner, an artist. Here he offers mostly quick snapshots of meaningful moments in his emotional life from childhood to the present, in prose so humorless and smoothly polished that it seldom communicates the wallop these epiphanies apparently packed for the author. In one skillful essay, he tells how at age six, in reaction to vague household tension, he killed the family canary beloved by his pianist father; beyond this striking moment, the author offers scant details about his parents” breakup, though there are several sketches of his current dealings with his aged, crippled father. More central to the story is the history of his homosexuality, from precocious prepubescent sex play through sublimated crushes on a succession of friends, many heterosexual relationships in high school and college, and finally, in his early 20s, gradual self- acceptance as a gay man. He was troubled by the typical conundrums of repressed homosexuality in adolescence—and less typical ones, such as what to make of a teacher’s gift of colorful nylon underpants (Rickel gave them back). As an adult, he spent years pursuing fruitless relationships with younger Mexicans he met in bars; he acknowledges “the racist overtones to my obsession with these boys,” but rather than examine this, he writes about how he willed himself to be attracted to non-—brown boys” as part of a “process of suspending my need for a defining narrative.” Such cold language obscures what makes the author tick. An uninvolving memoir of an uneventful life. (Author tour)
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-299-16260-5
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1999
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
