A casually told but often compelling account of wrestling with inner turmoil against gritty, dramatic international settings.
A young man grapples with bipolar “voices” via religion, hedonism, activism, and Lithium.
In his debut, Monroe-Kane, a Peabody Award–winning public radio producer, brings a fresh perspective to familiar memoir territory. During his childhood, his impoverished family stressed a spirit of eccentric independence, which enabled him to conceal symptoms of mania. “For the most part, I didn’t worry much about the voices,” he writes. “But at night, things could get dicey.” In adolescence, the author was drawn first to evangelicalism, deciding the voices meant he’d been “anointed by God as his special emissary,” then to the Mennonites he met at a small religious college. Diagnosed as schizophrenic following a breakdown in college, he threw himself into volunteer missionary work, which led to immersion in the leftist radical scene around Amsterdam. He enjoyed sexual and chemical awakenings, while his manic energy compelled him to organize grass-roots events, although his frustrated comrades eventually expelled him after a monthlong LSD binge. Humiliated, he then went to Prague, where the post-communist cultural awakening inspired him to give up psychiatric medication for the next 15 years. “The time had come,” he writes, “…to bring back the voices. To admit more loose associations.” The narrative speeds up into a further blur of hard drug use and sex until an ominous encounter with organized crime during a scheme to open the city’s first internet cafe points him (rather neatly) toward a resolution. The conclusion finds the author married with children, done with hard drugs, but relying on therapy and medication: “My daily doses were back, and with them returned all the old doubts.” Monroe-Kane writes about his fevered youth clearly and thoughtfully, underscoring how religious fervor, politics, and a party lifestyle can all mesh dangerously with mental illness.
A casually told but often compelling account of wrestling with inner turmoil against gritty, dramatic international settings.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-299-31000-4
Page Count: 196
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2016
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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