Revealing and riveting. There's little about his brother, his two marriages or his children, but other memoirs may follow.
Hitchens (Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, 2009, etc.) offers an engrossing account of his lives as a British Navy brat, a socialist activist and a leading essayist and intellectual of our time.
Now in his early 60s, the author grew up a bookish, self-confident, lower-middle-class boy in the British provinces. He has few memories of his father, “The Commander,” a taciturn career Navy man, but recalls with warmth and affection his mother, Yvonne, who shaped his childhood. Bright, pretty and unhappily married, she yearned for a life of smart friends and witty conversation—which Christopher would later lead—and often admonished, “The one unforgivable sin is to be boring.” She committed suicide, apologizing in a note for leaving a mess (“Oh Mummy, so like you,” writes Hitchens). She never mentioned her Jewish ancestry, which the author learned about later. In this frank, often wickedly funny account, Hitchens traces his evolution as a fiercely independent thinker and enemy of people who are convinced of their absolute certainty. He describes his budding socialist days at boarding school, where he helped create a student magazine (“Ink-stained pamphleteer! Very heaven!”); his ’60s years at Balliol College, Oxford, where he protested the Vietnam War, debated at the Oxford Union and lost his virginity; and his subsequent life as a young journalist working for both mainstream and “agitational” papers in London. Writing at length about friendships with Ted Hughes, James Fenton, Martin Amis and Ian McEwan, he seems always to have another fascinating encounter—a visit with his near-blind literary hero Jorge Luis Borges, a melancholy lunch with Chester Kallman shortly after his partner W.H. Auden's death—lurking in the next paragraph or footnote. Hitchens also details the many controversies in which he has engaged since moving to the United States in the early ’80s, including his defense of free expression in the Salman Rushdie affair and his support of the Iraq War. Once deemed a prodigious drinker, Hitchens notes that he now imbibes his Scotch whiskey carefully and produces more than 1,000 words per day.
Revealing and riveting. There's little about his brother, his two marriages or his children, but other memoirs may follow.Pub Date: June 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-54033-9
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Twelve
Review Posted Online: Dec. 15, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
PERSPECTIVES
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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