A memoir of growing up in a small Southern town during the Great Depression and World War II by doctor and author Meador (Fascinomas, 2013).
After attending the funeral of John Sherling, one of his two best boyhood friends, Meador realized that the story of his youth in Greenville, Alabama, might be interesting to his descendants, and to general readers. Growing up, he says, he was unaware that some of the people he knew—cross-dressing Juan Carlos, intellectually challenged “Frog,” mother-daughter prostitute team Louise and Pearl, fearless prankster Leon, and his two best friends, Sherling and Charles Chambliss—would be unique characters anywhere, let alone in tiny Greenville, where people were categorized by religion, gas brand preference and men’s-club membership. Some aspects of Greenville life, however, were not at all unique for a Southern town, including the acceptance of racial segregation and the contrast between city and country life. Meador tells the unvarnished truth about his adolescence; he doesn’t try to inflict 21st century sensibilities on his youth, nor does he attempt to prove that his beliefs were significantly different from those of other Alabamians of the time. His younger self’s burgeoning teenage libido also receives extensive attention. At times, however, the book’s remembrances seem emotionally detached, whether due to the passage of years or a deliberate choice. For example, the book mentions the loss of the author’s mother to colon cancer merely as background to other stories, and as the reason he and his father began taking meals at Mrs. Riley’s boardinghouse, when her death was likely a huge, watershed moment in the family’s life. To his credit, however, Meador resists giving in to the nostalgic conceit that life was better when he was young.
A solid, if not emotionally insightful, memoir for fans of stories of the American South, the Great Depression and the homefront of World War II.
Pub Date: June 21, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499174397
Page Count: 188
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 29, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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