Strong writing barely illuminates the murky narrative.
A British-American journalist wrestles with his parents’ demons, taking him back to Cold War–era Prague.
Laurence’s memoir chronicles the period during which he and his family lived in Prague, the late 1950s. His father was serving as an officer in the British Foreign Office, and his glamorous mother had an affair with a Czech playboy and impresario who was also collaborating with the Communist police. During this time, the author’s sister, Kate—she was eight when they arrived in 1957, he was seven—developed anorexia and began a dangerous see-sawing cycle of weight loss that ruined her health and caused her untimely death in 2000. Laurence chases, but never adequately answers, the question, what really happened to Kate in Prague? The “social agent” of the title, and fulcrum of the story, was an attractive man the family met in Prague—Jirí Mucha, who had escaped the German invasion of Czechoslovakia during the war, aided the British, spent time in prison after the Soviets took Czechoslovakia and, according to files the author recently found, spied for the Communist state in order to maintain his fabulous lifestyle. This included Mucha’s accomplished wife, Geraldine, whom the author was able to visit in Prague when she was nearly 90; numerous mistresses (orgies were hinted at, involving teenaged girls); and professional seductions, such as the British attaché’s wife, Mrs. Laurence. The author hints at many dark secrets that are left unexplored, such as the deep resentment he feels toward his mother—revealed in one shocking confrontation between them as the father lay dying—and the espionage angle serves as a pretense to investigate a much deeper family wound.
Strong writing barely illuminates the murky narrative.Pub Date: March 5, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-56663-845-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ivan Dee/Rowman & Littlefield
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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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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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