Readers can hope that more crisp and thoughtful essays on life, old age, and death will be forthcoming from a centenarian...
Approaching her 98th birthday, the astonishingly vital and fiercely intelligent Athill adds a charming addendum to her previous memoir on aging, Somewhere Towards the End (2009).
Following an introduction in which she muses about the pleasures of thinking about past events, people, and places, the author offers 11 essays filled with candid memories and reflections. The first is a fond recollection from the 1920s and 1930s of the garden at Ditchingham Hall (the kitchen garden was “a wonderfully thought-out and maintained fabrication of beauty”), her grandparents’ country home in Norfolk, and the second is a look back at the 1940s and 1950s and the pleasures of life in postwar England. What follows are a variety of vivid accounts, the most deeply personal of which tells of her pregnancy in her early 40s, her decision to bear the child, and then the miscarriage that nearly killed her. For readers of a certain age, her decision to give up her independence, move into a home for the elderly, and discover unexpected pleasures there will especially resonate. Whether she is writing about clothes, books, possessions, or relationships, Athill seems always to be completely honest and without unnecessary sentiment. Death does not alarm her—she approves of the sensible, practical way that it is dealt with in her retirement home—and as an atheist, she finds no comfort in the idea of an afterlife. However, as she admitted in her previous memoir on aging, the actual process of dying causes some anxiety. In her final essay here, she allows that one cannot expect an easy dying, but one can still hope for it.
Readers can hope that more crisp and thoughtful essays on life, old age, and death will be forthcoming from a centenarian Athill.Pub Date: Jan. 4, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-393-25371-9
Page Count: 180
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
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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