A memoir of bilious excess, related with humor and just the right amount of acidic sadness.
Wannabe writer gets sidetracked from the literary life by the Internet ’90s.
Goodwillie’s fresh and invigorating debut opens at Kenyon College, where his half-baked writerly dreams are unexpectedly derailed when he winds up as the star of the little school’s previously DOA baseball team. Come graduation time, he’s being scouted by the majors. When that doesn’t work out, it’s off to the Big Apple, where he hopes to get a little of what he’d gone to Kenyon for: “the lure of a literary existence.” He finds a bunch of his old friends; a job as a private investigator researching Mafia shakedowns in Chinatown; an on-again, off-again coke habit; and a Cuban roommate named Gus who works as a press agent for Mayor Rudy Giuliani but somehow knows more about the literary world than Goodwillie does. The book unfolds like the life of many casting-about recent grads: in fits and starts, demarcated by new jobs and new relationships, strung together in a haze of bars. The author moves, by luck and accident, from being a private investigator to writing catalogue copy for a sports-memorabilia auction house to working as a sports researcher at Sotheby’s (“holding pen for the unmarried children of well-known families”). Then he joins a succession of high-flying Internet startups, and we feel the steam gathering for the millennial explosion of irrational exuberance. Goodwillie tries to hang on to his literary dreams, publishing an investigative piece here, a short story there, rooming with an apocalyptically depressed screenwriter. But mostly, he just gets sucked into the fantasy of easy money. When the collapse finally comes, he has the sense not to wallow in self-pity, relying instead on a congenial tone of self-mockery and smart, finely tuned storytelling.
A memoir of bilious excess, related with humor and just the right amount of acidic sadness.Pub Date: June 2, 2006
ISBN: 1-56512-465-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
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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