Pulses with a life force that illustrates why this poet “had also begun to love the shape that prose made in [her] head.”
Interconnected autobiographical essays from a poet whose life in New York City has bestowed both blessings and heartbreak.
In gauzy yet substantial prose, Zarin (The Ada Poems, 2010, etc.) takes readers on a journey through a lifetime's worth of homes, relationships and landscapes, displaying wry humor and an endearing sense of uneasiness with the tropes of memoir. Far from an exhibitionist’s tell-all, this collection instead grants us entry into the world of a private person, a woman who acknowledges that she is “entirely unsuited to selflessness” and who doles out tantalizingly cryptic bits of personal information. Zarin often depicts herself as a dreamer gazing out of windows, pretending that the spire of a metropolitan church resembles one in Prague or conflating the characters in films and books based on shared imagery. Indeed, one of the great pleasures of the book is the recurring nature of its images: Yellow stockings, blue bowls of strawberries, diaphanous curtains, familiar restaurants and drinking straws flit through these essays like the dragonflies that the author describes cyclically swarming at her favorite beach. None of this should suggest frivolity, however, for Zarin also excels at tackling difficult subjects with grace; “September” simply begins, “The Thursday before I received a telephone call from the children’s school.” The date that remains absent from that sentence permeates the rest of the essay. She treats the Holocaust, childhood fears and her youngest daughter’s illness with similarly powerful restraint, which makes her reaction to the latter especially potent: “I think, If this child dies, I will go mad. I think of a woman who wishes me ill, and I think, If something happens to this child, I will kill her.”
Pulses with a life force that illustrates why this poet “had also begun to love the shape that prose made in [her] head.”Pub Date: Feb. 12, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4000-4271-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Jan. 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
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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