A personal memoir that for honesty, interest, and the steadiness of its inner searching equals the very best of its kind, bringing to mind, for example, books like Eva Hoffman's Lost in Translation. Longtime fiction writer Blaise, now past 50, sets out once and for all to determine who he is and where he's from, neither of these questions being simple ones in Blaise's case. ``I'm a native of nowhere,'' he writes; ``I do not know where I come from because I have come from just about everywhere.'' He was born in North Dakota to a mother from Winnipeg and to a French-Canadian father who remains the central and governing mystery in his life, and who, as a glamorously alluring but compulsively self-detructive businessman and salesman, moved his wife and son endlessly from place to place in the southern, eastern, and middlewestern US throughout the years of Blaise's growing up. Geographically rootless, Blaise's life was wildly indeterminate also in matters of social class (his mother was educated, his father was not) and ethnic identity—his father, secretive and less than honest in numerous other ways as well, tried to keep his French-Canadian origins hidden, even changing his name in a doomed effort to ``mainstream'' himself into the American middle class. Out of these family origins of ethnic and cultural indeterminacy and ambiguity- -family life also included divorce, violence, loss, and abandonment—Blaise has fashioned his own often exquisitely beautiful narrative of emergent selfhood and literary coming of age, assembling a lyrically quilt-like history of family and self that isn't afraid—the book becomes a kind of latter-day Huck Finn- -to take as part of its natural theme the unformed and often barbaric conscience of a nation. A compelling and unflaggingly intelligent autobiography from the author of two novels and four books of stories (including A North American Education), now director of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.
Pub Date: April 1, 1993
ISBN: 0-201-58128-0
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Addison-Wesley
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1993
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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