More descriptive than analytical, but a memorable portrait of a family fiercely loyal and loving to all but their...
A granddaughter mixes local lore and family history in the story of her mother’s family in Newfoundland, where sudden death is usual.
Newfoundland was an independent British colony until it joined Canada in 1949, a step not universally welcomed, for Newfoundlanders are a proud people, stoically enduring a harsh climate, dangerous work, and frequent poverty. Loyal to Britain, they suffered enormous casualties in WWI, but, as Downton notes, “dying in the war was noble. Dying at sea was not; it was expected, common, a way of life.” Like their fellow islanders, her own family experienced losses at sea and on land as uncles drowned, infant cousins died from diptheria, other relatives from tuberculosis—which also afflicted but didn’t kill her grandfather, though his children devoutly wished it had. Grandmother Ethel was a cultured, college-educated schoolteacher who married Sidney Wiseman, the youngest son of a wealthy fishing family. The family believed Ethel had really loved Sidney’s elder brother, Good, who was drowned at sea, and that she’d merely settled for Sidney, though Ethel insisted she loved him. Sidney was a monster, and the memoir—which moves back and forth in time as if the narrator were telling it to a family gathering, where long-forgotten memories often interrupt—suggests that he may have been mentally unstable. Whatever the cause, he treated his wife and six children with chilling cruelty: he locked a son in his room for an entire summer; deliberately, he once nearly drowned the writer’s mother; and on a stormy winter’s night he locked her outside in the snow. Ethel was frequently beaten, once so badly she had to have a kidney removed. Downton relates how the children adored their mother, who would never speak ill of their father, but escaped as soon as they could from a hellish father.
More descriptive than analytical, but a memorable portrait of a family fiercely loyal and loving to all but their unspeakable father.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-55970-665-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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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