Keenan understands how much the world has changed and hopes her story will resonate with reflective readers who will...
A memoir about “what it was like to grow up…in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s in a family that was, like Britain itself, facing and adapting to the enormous changes taking place around us with gathering speed.” Keenan (Packing Up: Further Adventures of a Trailing Spouse, 2014, etc.), who lived in India until she was 8, recounts her childhood in India followed by her career as a fashion reporter in London during the 1960s. The author’s gossipy, lighthearted narrative offers a peek into the lives of a certain slice of British society. As a member of the British military, the author’s father was posted to India. Born in 1939, Keenan was a member of the generation known as “the last of the British Raj babies.” Keenan interweaves her memories of her family life on a British army base with the rich cultural, social, and political life of India. In 1947, following Indian independence from the 200-year British rule and the division of India into two countries, the family returned to Britain. Returning home to a “grim postwar England after a Technicolor childhood in one of England’s colonies” as a teenager was a challenge. However, the author became one of the it girls of her day and was cited as “one of the two best young fashion writers of the day.” While many of the pop cultural references and personalities Keenan mentions may be unfamiliar to American readers, the author skillfully captures the zeitgeist of the youth rebellion in London during the 1960s. Her world did include a solid cast of well-known characters, including Nora Ephron, Jean Shrimpton, Terence Conran, Mary Quant, Diana Vreeland, and Vidal Sassoon.
Keenan understands how much the world has changed and hopes her story will resonate with reflective readers who will appreciate her brief but warm glance back in time.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4088-5227-9
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2016
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
© 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
