Melancholy and madness that envelops the reader in its halting, frightful precincts.
The sorrowful days of a single welfare mother who can’t get what she wants and can’t get rid of what she doesn’t.
This is the story of one Capri Spettro, though in a note to the book, Santi says it is hers as well. That’s not hard to imagine considering its immediate, aching bite. It is a tale of woe told in a ramble, as one might spool out a story while doing the dishes after dinner with a new acquaintance–the harshness beveled by unfamiliarity, the particulars lacing this way and that, a stream of consciousness that maintains a clear thread. Her story is harsh, though it starts out smoothly enough. Capri grows up in Ohio, daughter of a loving mother and strict father in a sizable family. She is a bold, brassy and troubled creature who finds drugs to her taste. Men, too, though each and every one–from the Prof (husband) to Frank, Gentry (true love), Henry (nemesis), Max, Steve, Bobby, Priest, Captain, Jimmy, Jeff–will prove a package of damaged goods, often brutally so. In her twenties, she has a passel of kids, low-rent jobs, frustrated musical longings, a penchant for bars and an inability to say no. Her life is so innocently recounted, all its late-night disappointments and wrong turns, wasted energy and drug use, that readers will want to grab her and give her a good shake–not like her boyfriends, if they can be called that, but to get some sense into her. “My brain. Ha! Now there’s an interesting subject,” and it is true. Her heart is broken again and again, but it’s her brain that deliquesces from one too many miseries. Her descent into obsession–John Lennon, numbers, the lottery, the CIA and FBI–is a dire portrait of mental misrule, and is left queasily dangling.
Melancholy and madness that envelops the reader in its halting, frightful precincts.Pub Date: Oct. 19, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-4490-3561-7
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
