An eclectic treasury of the cherished and the evocative.
A pensive perusal of the objects that can define and shape a life.
The materials that actress and essayist Lenney (Bigger than Life: A Murder, a Memoir, 2007) draws her inspiration from may be commonplace items, but to her, they “tell the stories of our lives.” The author reflects on integral items present throughout her history. Beloved is the Tiffany watch generously given as a wedding gift by her Grandpa Charlie, whose Steinway baby grand piano proved to be laborious to disassemble and relocate to her home in Los Angeles. Though uneven, the collection’s pieces build on each other, layer upon vivid layer of Lenney’s personal history, her heart firmly invested in hearth and home. The author’s family forms the centerpiece in a good portion of these ruminative writings, including a spontaneous, nostalgic revisit to her childhood home, an epistolary essay to her father, or a standout piece, “Nests,” which beautifully intertwines her sister’s dispirited emotional state with a family of watchful doves. Elsewhere, Lenney blissfully contemplates a spoon pilfered from summers spent at a resort, a scarf knitted during Hamlet rehearsals, a black dress that has escorted her through a temperamental acting career. One of the book’s most moving entries also happens to be its shortest: a strikingly gorgeous, two-page homage to Lenney’s daughter, portrayed as a young girl bouncing in the sun trailing a kite flush with bright streamers. Though she does tend to wander off on expository jaunts in less-engaging essays, the author remains a lyrical observer of everyday objects. Indeed, her truest passion lies in the heartfelt sentimentality for those things that “tether us to place and people and the past, to feeling and thought, to each other and ourselves, to some admittedly elusive understanding of the passage of time.”
An eclectic treasury of the cherished and the evocative.Pub Date: April 15, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61902-300-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Feb. 23, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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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