A candid and humorous tale.
A seasoned traveler’s memoir about his father’s death and the nagging need to make peace with the past.
Flashing back to 1972, when the 7-year-old author was “living with my parents in the worst apartment in a good Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles,” Galaudet launches into a chronicle of his three-decade relationship with his father, an old-school Chicagoan who survived the Great Depression by honing a keen skill of hustling to survive. A big drinker, gambler, and coarse adventurist with few parenting skills, he would disappear and reappear, first for days and weeks, and later years, throughout the author’s life. Despite the absenteeism, Galaudet, who runs the In the Know Traveler websites, clearly respected his father, yearning for his approval and striving to emulate him while nurturing an ongoing love-hate relationship. Fast-forward 20-some years, when the author was a restless, multiskilled, soul-searching adult living temporarily in Las Vegas as a location scout for a boss he hated. One day, Galaudet received a call from Cathy, his father’s most recent wife, who informed him that his dad had suffered a fatal heart attack. He also left a bizarre last wish to have his ashes spread near the seaside village of Cadiz, Spain, while a native speaker sang “Ave Maria” as the soundtrack. “Really,” writes the author, “he wanted to be sent into outer space on a rocket, but he knew that was not going to happen.” So Galaudet was suddenly forced to contend with the past, a project that he shelved indefinitely. Several years later, he finally traveled with his father’s remains in a rucksack, attending a bullfight, visiting cafes, and having conversations with the ashes as he struggled to find closure. With asides spanning the years from his pot-smoking, pill-popping teenage years to his later adult failures as an average American man, this navel-gazing hoot of a memoir rings with themes that will appeal to many readers coming-of-age in the 1970s and ’80s.
A candid and humorous tale.Pub Date: Sept. 18, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-947856-16-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Vireo/Rare Bird Books
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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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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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