A sincere but flawed recounting of a search for self-knowledge.
A father’s absence looms large in his son’s life.
Waters (Fiction Writing/Lewis & Clark Coll.; The Saints of Rattlesnake Mountain: Stories, 2017, etc.) makes his nonfiction debut with a frank, earnest memoir about his search for a father. Because he had no contact with his father growing up, the author felt bereft of the love and guidance that he envied in other father-son relationships. Being fatherless obsessed him: “Any man whose father leaves can understand the shame, confusion, and anger generated by such a primal loss.” Although he was hungry for answers about why his father left and stayed away, when his father unexpectedly sent him a brief autobiography, it took Waters years to finally read it because he was “frightened by what the pages might say about him or about me.” Surprised to discover that his father had been a surfer—a sport Waters himself loved—he decided to write a magazine article about surfing, imagining that researching and writing “could lead to something deeper, something important, and something curative.” The author’s need for healing led him to several failed attempts to write a memoir and also to undergo therapy for more than a decade, which he recounts in some verbatim conversations. When he suggested to his therapist that he should stop dwelling on his father and give up the memoir project, she dissuaded him. Unfortunately, writing as therapy may be more successful for the author than readers, who are confronted with too many assorted details and digressions: memories of various father figures, frustration about his writing, reflections on his relationship with his wife, their attempts to have a baby, his doubts about his own capacity to be a father, and a parallel story about another Don Waters, a sailor and writer born in the late 1800s whose family life provides a useful reality check on the author’s own illusions. “It’s a great example,” he tells his therapist, “that no matter how someone’s life looks from the outside, no one’s life is ever perfect.”
A sincere but flawed recounting of a search for self-knowledge.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-60938-679-5
Page Count: 230
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: July 27, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2019
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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