by Dikkon Eberhart ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 23, 2015
An often lighthearted but also profound recounting of a life in search of art and faith.
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A memoir charting an artist’s lifelong challenge to accept his calling.
Eberhart was raised by a famous poet, Richard Eberhart, and surrounded in his youth by accomplished writers: e.e. cummings, Alan Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, and an impressive cast of others. In this often bemusing recounting of an unconventional upbringing, Eberhart describes a family that quietly, even unselfconsciously, displayed its own brand of eccentricity. His mother once met Hitler—a story he used to impress his childhood friends—and his great grandfather invented floor wax, which Eberhart’s father sold for a time. Despite the high jinks, such an artistically sensitive environment could be frustrating for a young adolescent looking for something to rebel against. “ ‘I am at war with you!’ I shouted. ‘At war!’ What Dad did about my shattering fury was to be Dad. ‘Ah, youth,’ he glowed the next day and patted me on the back. ‘What energy! What purity of emotion! What muscles! Hurrah!’ This made it worse.” The author struggled to accept his magnetic attraction to pursuing art as his life’s work—a calling that was like family inheritance. He pursued theater before finally realizing that writing was the medium that most deeply inspired him. The book is a hybrid of dynamic parts; sometimes, Eberhart will digress to treat readers to a literary analysis of a famous poem (Robert Frost’s “The Road Less Travelled” is a memorable instance) or to discuss the psychology behind an artist’s work. For example, he furnishes a provocative but breezily anecdotal account of the way family friend T.S. Eliot’s work was both elevated and limited by his traditionalism. The extraordinary arc of Eberhart’s maturation—and coming to terms with his father’s legacy—culminates in a religious conversion. After years of mining Judaism for spiritual succor, the author, along with his second wife, finally found peace of mind in Christianity. He explains with philosophical subtlety the ways in which submitting to one father, God himself, helped him reconcile with another, his poet dad. The path he took was a meandering one, like an epic poem.
An often lighthearted but also profound recounting of a life in search of art and faith.Pub Date: June 23, 2015
ISBN: 978-1414399843
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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