The renowned humorist fashions an affectionate portrait of his father that muses on the elliptical methods by which men raise sons and by which sons strive to please fathers. Trillin likens his father's ``messages''—indirect signals combining expectation, assumption, and wish—to a secret code. Their meanings were ambiguous to young Calvin. No fan of heart-to- hearts, Abe Trillin's most direct advice was the low-key dictum ``You might as well be a mensch.'' By turns a grocer, restaurateur, hotelkeeper, and real estate developer, Abe was indeed a mensch—a person who always does the right thing—and it's clear his messages and example transmitted a powerful moral code his son still follows. Legendarily stubborn, thrifty, and opinionated, the Russian immigrant earned a reputation for taciturnity but also possessed American optimism and a comic sense that mixed Yiddish humor with a midwesterner's self-deprecating ingenuousness. He was a man of many theories: on butchers, gin strategy, and women's dental fitness (good teeth are the key to a happy marriage), and a connoisseur of curses. Calvin's well-documented love of doggerel finds an antecedent in the verses Abe penned for the menu of his Kansas City restaurant: ``Don't sigh/eat pie.'' The writer obviously relishes Abe as card and character, but it's an amusement tempered by sobering loss at Abe's death, and by a sense of awe (heightened by his own experience with parenthood) that his father managed to pass on as much as he did. Of Abe's typically oblique support of writing as a possible vocation, Trillin wryly muses: ``Would that be how you'd steer your son toward journalism—slip the word to him casually when he's three years old and then make sure he knows how to type?'' With characteristic grace and good humor, Trillin crafts a charming, heartfelt memorial to his father that is also a loving demonstration of how deeply he took his father's advice to heart. (Author tour)
Pub Date: June 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-374-20860-3
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1996
Asante is a talented writer, but his memoir is undernourished.
A young black man’s self-destructive arc, cut short by a passion for writing.
Asante’s (It’s Bigger than Hip-Hop, 2008, etc.) memoir, based on his teenage years in inner-city Philadelphia, undoubtedly reflects the experiences of many African-American youngsters today in such cities. By age 14, the author was an inquisitive, insecure teen facing the hazards that led his beleaguered mother, a teacher, to warn him, “[t]hey are out there looking for young black boys to put in the system.” This was first driven home to Asante when his brother received a long prison sentence for statutory rape; later, his father, a proud, unyielding scholar of Afrocentrism, abruptly left under financial strain, and his mother was hospitalized after increasing emotional instability. Despite their strong influences, Asante seemed headed for jail or death on the streets. This is not unexplored territory, but the book’s strength lies in Asante’s vibrant, specific observations and, at times, the percussive prose that captures them. The author’s fluid, filmic images of black urban life feel unique and disturbing: “Fiends, as thin as crack pipes, dance—the dancing dead….Everybody’s eyes curry yellow or smog gray, dead as sunken ships.” Unfortunately, this is balanced by a familiar stance of adolescent hip-hop braggadocio (with some of that genre’s misogyny) and by narrative melodrama of gangs and drug dealing that is neatly resolved in the final chapters, when an alternative school experience finally broke through Asante’s ennui and the murderous dealers to whom he owed thousands were conveniently arrested. The author constantly breaks up the storytelling with unnecessary spacing, lyrics from (mostly) 1990s rap, excerpts from his mother’s journal, letters from his imprisoned brother, and quotations from the scholars he encountered on his intellectual walkabout in his late adolescence. Still, young readers may benefit from Asante’s message: that an embrace of books and culture can help one slough off the genuinely dangerous pathologies of urban life.
Asante is a talented writer, but his memoir is undernourished.Pub Date: Aug. 20, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9341-7
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
Remarkable bravery fluently recounted.
The ably reconstructed story of the author’s convoluted escape from North Korea, detailing the hardships of life there and the serendipity of flight.
A supremely determined young woman, Lee chronicles her life in North Korea and her defection in her late teens in 1998. With the assistance of co-author John, she re-creates a picaresque tale of incredible, suspenseful, and truly death-defying adventures, which eventually led her to asylum in South Korea and then America. The author grew up largely in the northeast province of Ryanggang, bordering the Yalu River with China, and her family home was in Hyesan. Her father was a privileged member of the military, and her enterprising mother was a successful trader on the black market. The family, including younger brother Min-ho, did not endure the hardships of famine like people of low songbun, or caste, but the author learned that her father was not her biological father only shortly before he died by suicide after being trailed by security, beaten, and imprisoned in her mid-teens. Her mother had previously married and divorced another man. At age 17, the lights of China, directly across the river, beckoned, and the author managed to cross and establish contact first with a trading partner of her mother’s, then dissident relatives of her father’s in Shenyang. While the author had no intention of leaving her mother, it was apparent that it was too dangerous for her to return. Her relatives shielded her for a few years, trying to arrange a marriage with a wealthy Korean-Chinese man, from whom the author fled at the eleventh hour. Working as a waitress in Shanghai afforded some invisibility, though she was always susceptible to con men and security police. As the narrative progresses, the author’s trials grow ever more astounding, especially as she eventually tried to get her mother and brother out of North Korea.
Remarkable bravery fluently recounted.Pub Date: July 7, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-00-755483-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper360
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2015
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