Warm tales of Catholic childhood by a professional storyteller. The only son of an Irish Catholic mother and a Protestant father, Stivender received a seven-course Catholic upbringing with all the trimmings. His training as a ``young Catholic Gentleman'' starts at Holy Cross Elementary School, where he learns the ``first rule of Catholic Education'' from Sister Virginia Mary: ``Make sure there is room for your Guardian Angel between you and your seat partner.'' Nuns dazzle him: ``I caught her scent. It was the most wonderful scent of a woman I have ever smelled. No perfume, no deodorant, no hair spray, not even talcum powder...she smelled holy.'' Stivender learns to walk in silent single file, a discipline that he calls ``the Catholic contribution to the peace movement of the sixties.'' Confession and Communion fill him with bliss, although at First Communion he forgets where he is, tilts his head back, and goes ``Ahhh.'' He marvels at the host, ``bread shaped into a circle and pressed almost into the second dimension.'' At Camp Columbus, he sees a priest's bare arm for the first time. A Catholic (JFK) runs for President; the Virgin appears at Stivender's bedside; a fundamentalist neighbor tells him that ``My daddy says nothin' in the world stranger'n a Catholic.'' The epiphanies of boyhood flood the book—first train set, first Cub Scout uniform, first job (as a shoeshine boy), first crush on a girl—but, here, they're wrapped in an all-encompassing faith, recounted with affection, great timing, and just the right dash of bittersweetness. A feast of good feelings: a Catholic Garrison Keillor, with less literary polish but just as much soul.
Pub Date: Oct. 2, 1992
ISBN: 0-87483-277-2
Page Count: 200
Publisher: August House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1992
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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