A touching memoir about a graphic artist devoting his retirement years to Christian ministerial work.
A debut memoir about a lifelong promise made to God.
When McCabe was a boy working in his father’s feed mill in rural Maryland, he spent his free time “talking to the Lord on the railroad tracks.” As these conversations grew easier, he made a deal: if God would permit him to grow up and become a successful commercial artist, he would, in return, retire at the age of 45 and spend the rest of his life serving God as a minister. He received no reply from God, but McCabe did go on to become a successful graphic artist. This plainspoken memoir doesn’t immediately move on to his professional life, however; instead, the author relates his formative years growing up with his taciturn, hardworking father and his well-intentioned mother. “Mom kept telling Dad he would be sorry someday if he did not get to know us before we got older,” he affectingly writes at one point before flatly adding, “But it was too late.” McCabe later attends the U.S. Army Combat Engineer School and then enrolls briefly in the School of Visual Arts in New York City and then the Maryland Institute College of Art before finally landing a series of jobs in the U.S. Government Printing Office in the late 1960s. Complications do arise, however: while working in the government’s Audio Visual Services Division in the late 1970s, McCabe began to experience health problems due to breathing in various chemicals from his graphics work. After some soul-searching, he retires and commences ministerial work, both in prisons and as a member of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship International. Throughout this book, the author effectively relates the human side of his various employments, as well as his marriage to his wife, Janice, in a series of well-turned vignettes. Many of these stories will give readers a good sense of what midlevel government work was like on a day-to-day basis a generation ago. Christian readers, in particular, will find it especially pleasant to read this story of a good man’s life in the service of family and God.
A touching memoir about a graphic artist devoting his retirement years to Christian ministerial work.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-1490866475
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Westbow Press
Review Posted Online: May 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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