A talented writer wrestles with demons, endeavoring to define and thus restrain—if not defeat—them.
From novelist Plante (The Age of Terror, 1999, etc.), an often-lyrical memoir of religion lost, sexual identity discovered, vocation found, and near-madness born of obsession.
This time out, Plante crafts a coming-of-age story that’s often surprising and illuminating, but sometimes conventional and even a tad dull. The author, who has Blackfoot ancestors, begins when he’s seven and afraid of the ghost of an Indian he imagines seeing in the neighborhood woods, and he ends with accounts of a close friend, novelist Mary Gordon, attempting to help him rediscover his Catholicism, and of his journeys to France in search of the burial records of some 17th-century Plantes. The boyhood portions are striking, none more so than the memory of a nun at school who appears to have an attraction for the young student. Helping him dress for a school play, she lightly touches the nape of his neck: “My body began to shake.” His body shakes later on, too, especially when, during a college year abroad, he hooks up with his first gay sex partner, a strange man named Öçi. The pair travel around Europe together, and much later Öçi dies of what seems to be AIDS. Plante eventually finds his permanent partner, a young Greek named Nikos, and then discovers that he is flirting with insanity as he tries to understand the images that haunt him. For a time, he records them in a journal at night, one image per page; after two years, he has 650 pages. What do they mean? Why do they keep him awake? Why does he write so obsessively that even Nikos has trouble getting his attention? Like several other memoirists, Plante assumes that substantial passages from his journals or commonplace books are interesting when often they aren’t. The final short passage, a French prayer once overheard, suggests that he has achieved a sort of epiphanic peace.
A talented writer wrestles with demons, endeavoring to define and thus restrain—if not defeat—them.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8070-7264-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Beacon Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2004
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
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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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