Spirited stories about appreciating life’s vagaries.
This follow-up volume of 13 autobiographical essays depicts a life “on destiny’s merry-go-round,” alternating witty anecdotes of good luck and bad.
Aboulafia (Snapshots from My Uneventful Life, 2015, etc.) believes “we are a reflection of what we experience in this world,” which in his case means a blend of minor disasters, averted crises, and everyday epiphanies. Even as a child, he tested his limits and assessed relationships. “Date Nut Bread,” about a dubious 1970s foodstuff from a can that often appeared in his lunchbox, was a symbol of his mother’s failure to understand kids; others got trendy treats like Oreos and salami. “The Test” recalls his alarmingly low IQ test score when entering first grade—though his reasoning was actually more advanced than the test could show. He objected that a drawing of a smiling cat jumping into a car didn’t represent happiness because cats don’t like riding in cars. Such analytical thinking skills later served the author well as a school administrator and lawyer. As in the first book, he gets a lot of comic mileage out of his youthful indiscretions, such as speeding while in possession of a suspended driver’s license. But he was still making laughable mistakes into adulthood, like when he and his wife ordered martinis from their Cape May hotel bar, not realizing they were the size of eight regular drinks. The longest essay, “Death By Whatever,” is a rollicking tale of multiple hazards narrowly avoided on a Florida vacation, such as big waves, horseflies, and barracudas. “The Ring” is the almost Solomonic fable of Aboulafia and his brother fighting over their ill father’s pinky ring, while “Scrooged!” tells of an office prank pulled on mean-spirited co-workers. Some of the more serious pieces—one about an oil burner repairman who taught him to let go of anger and another about spreading the ashes of his father’s friends—are so short they’re over before they’ve hardly begun. Overall, there are fewer memorable moments and an irksome superfluity of italics, but the mischievous tone still shines through.
Spirited stories about appreciating life’s vagaries.Pub Date: June 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-78099-374-4
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Roundfire Books
Review Posted Online: June 19, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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