An in-depth personal/sociological/cultural saga of one US family, 1945-90. Beginning with Sam Gordon's 1945 return from WW II to his wife and two-year-old daughter in Brooklyn, Katz (The Big Store, winner of the 1988 Heartland Prize for nonfiction) tells the life story of the Gordons and their three daughters and son. Integral to Katz's narrative are the social trends, generational perspectives, movies, books, and music that shape and texture the Gordons' lives. Thus in the Fifties, the Gordons live by the widely touted ideal of ``togetherness,'' all sitting down after dinner to an evening of TV. By the late Sixties, though, when the daughters have their own families, psychological pundits have declared that the nuclear family's rigid togetherness breeds psychoses and emotional damage. Sam Gordon, the personification of American blue-collar, work-hard-and-better-your-lot ethic, is bewildered when his daughter moves into the East Village squalor of his childhood, and disappointed in his only son, who grows up to be a gay art-song composer (though Ricky eventually becomes the apple of Sam's eye). Susan, born in 1943, enjoys the most dramatic story. Winning a scholarship to Vassar, she becomes a successful writer—covering the 1967 ``First Human Be-in'' in Golden Gate Park for Newsweek, and receiving a $10,000 advance from Random House for a pre-Kate Millett feminist analysis of sex. By 1987, though, she's a junkie living on the street. The trouble with Katz's account is that, despite its immense detail and careful meshing of familial foreground and social background, it sometimes seems historical and cold, with the cultural artifacts surrounding the Gordons often the most typical and obvious ones of years past. Of interest but not quite a match for William Manchester's The Glory and the Dream (1974), the brilliant cultural history to which Katz's book, with its twist of family overlay, owes much. (Sixteen-page b&w photo insert—not seen.)
Pub Date: June 17, 1992
ISBN: 0-06-019009-4
Page Count: 624
Publisher: HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1992
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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