An eloquent voice that will be missed.
Final memoir from the late Knapp (Pack of Two, 1998, etc.), this one recording her decades-long struggle with anorexia.
As she did in Drinking: A Love Story (1996), the author makes connections among different kinds of addictive behavior, be it self-starvation, getting blind drunk, or compulsive shopping. But rather than narrowly focusing on the behaviors, Knapp delves into the question of appetite as a symbol: why women suppress their “wants” in the first place. At 19, a junior at Brown, she began the spiral into anorexia. After spending Thanksgiving with her family, she returned to the campus to write a paper, but was too anxious and depressed to walk to the student cafeteria for dinner. Instead, Knapp purchased a container of cottage cheese and some rice cakes, stretching the small meal over the next three days. That purchase, she writes, “represented a turning point, the passage of a woman at a crossroads, one road marked Empty, the other marked Full. Not believing at the core that fullness—satiety, gratification, pleasure—was within my grasp, I chose the other road.” What caused this choice? Knapp explores her relationship with her mother (somewhat distant, but not terrible by any means); media messages (women do internalize these messages, she notes, but not all of them become anorexic, so the media by itself isn’t entirely to blame); and cultural trends from the Me Generation to the extravagant dot.com dreams of the ’90s. After years of therapy, the love of her celebrated canine, rowing, and a solid romantic relationship, she finally chose to re-enter the world. Knapp concludes by saying that contemporary women live during a time when they may be psychically liberated, able to have careers and make reproductive choices, but are not socially supported; for all the rhetoric, women still do most of the housekeeping and parenting. Her beautiful prose is bolstered throughout with nice anecdotes from research material and the author’s personal experiences.
An eloquent voice that will be missed.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-58243-225-2
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
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
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BOOK REVIEW
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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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