A large step for the writer that reads like a smaller accomplishment.
A middle-age rite-of-passage memoir by a writing teacher and published poet.
A father of one with a second on the way, Console (Creative Writing/Kansas City Art Institute; The Odicy, 2011, etc.) seems still to be struggling with the issues he faced as an undergraduate, when he had “the sense of living for alcohol.” He has been sober for more than a decade, though it took him longer to give up marijuana. He misses both but mainly the second. “Maybe I quit using drugs for nothing, I think,” he writes. “It’s not like I have ever lost anything important because of my habits. I am not a real addict in that sense, not unless I am in some kind of denial.” This travel journal details a journey to his wife’s home country of Romania, where neither her marriage (her second) nor their daughter has received official sanction. Before departing, they learned that the fetus she was carrying could have Down syndrome. By the time they returned, a later-term abortion was illegal, though Console was daunted by the idea of raising a child with such special needs. At least that’s what he thought at the outset, when he was determined to refer to it as a “fetus” rather than a baby (and later a baby with a name). As he pondered the morality of his decision (as well as returning to eating meat after years as a vegetarian), he worried mostly about his failure to achieve his potential to write something of significance. “Yet I postpone the decision to begin,” he writes. “I must begin, I must begin to begin.” By the end of this slim volume, its paragraphs jumping back and forth in time and often having only tenuous connections to each other, Console has faced some tough decisions, attained a maturity he was lacking at the start, and has written something.
A large step for the writer that reads like a smaller accomplishment.Pub Date: March 21, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-86547-830-5
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
