Well-meaning and obviously cathartic, but hardly transformative.
Chirpy, largely forgettable essays on relationships.
Joseph (Creative Writing/Minnesota State Univ., Mankato) assumes a kind of Everywoman tone in these vignettes about the men in her life. There are moments of sharp, biting prose, especially in the first essay, “Tongue Twister, Tongue Tied,” in which her father—a kind of chain-smoking Ralph Cramden who rarely wore a shirt and referred to her brothers as “assholes”—lectures the author as a young girl about sex only once, offering advice on promiscuity (“when a girl goes with this one, and then with that one, and then with that one over there, and with who knows how many others, what happens is people start to talk”). The first man who swept her off her feet was a hapless older demolition-derby racer (“Love in the Age of Ick”) who called her Momma and wanted to fatten her up to increase her “rack.” “Did I really love him,” wonders Joseph, “or did I just hate myself?” In “What’s (Not) Simple,” she delineates her relationship with her first husband, Karl Bennett, a man twice-divorced, 20 years her elder and with a daughter three years younger than she: “I sort of suspected he had some weird ideas about what a woman’s place might be.” Regardless, they married when she was six months pregnant; the product of that ill-starred union is called “the boy” in subsequent essays. He was born on Hitler’s birthday, had “trench foot” because he rarely took baths or changed socks, stayed indoors to play video games and held alarming political opinions. Nonetheless, Joseph assures us he was adorable. Her frank character portraits flay her subjects as blithely as herself—for example, her friend Andrew Boyle must have been a pervert because he took “art photos” of his naked girlfriends (“It’s Me. It’s Him. It’s Them”), and the hard-drinking English chair at the university where she taught routinely insulted her when drunk (“Lighten Up”). The low-key approach often veers into flat-footed, hackneyed prose.
Well-meaning and obviously cathartic, but hardly transformative.Pub Date: March 5, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-399-15528-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Amy Einhorn/Putnam
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2009
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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