A writer’s up-and-down search for profundity in the insecure and unrefined corners of his life.
Tin House managing editor Knapp debuts with a collection of essays that attempt to balance highbrow and lowbrow elements.
In “Faces of Pain,” the author and a photographer attend a wrestling event held at the Portland Lion’s Club, where he “saw so many incredible things I almost couldn’t believe my eyes.” “Beirut” is an existential reflection on beer pong and the author’s frat-house 20s. “Mysteries We Live With” is an investigation into true-believer UFO subculture mixed with stories of the author’s own Christian upbringing. Most of the essays flow with self-deprecating charm, but Knapp often trips over his own wordiness and unnecessarily complicated verbiage. In the 90-page concluding essay, “Something’s Gotta Stick,” the author recounts his days at an adult skateboarding camp, lost in nostalgia while hunting for affirmation that would “clarify my relationship to my past, and, in so doing, help me lean into the future as if it were a headwind.” Knapp sees stories everywhere, committed to a belief that the lives around him are each their own unwritten memoirs. While a curious, self-conscious take on memoir, Knapp’s essays are often overwrought. The prolix “Neighborhood Watch” is a story of gentrification and the intersection of neighboring lives in the aftermath of a local man’s murder. The author ponders, again, “the vital and vivifying mystery” of life, that another person’s existence can be so different yet “so close to where the epic drama of your own life is set.” “Why can’t I get out of my own way?” he asks in one essay. “Seems I’m always getting caught in the sticky wicket of self-consciousness, overaware of how the story’s being told. Overaware that a story’s being told. My default mode tends to be this one of narration, meaning, roughly, that an experience doesn’t really become ‘real’ for me until it’s prosed.” These essays, often about trying to be stories we’re not, are carried by Knapp’s struggle toward self-acceptance.
A writer’s up-and-down search for profundity in the insecure and unrefined corners of his life.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-6102-5
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Nov. 12, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2017
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
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