Storyteller and entertainer Stivender offers more affectionate glimpses of his Irish-Catholic upbringing in Philadelphia in the late 1950s and early '60s. The 12 chapters of this sequel to Raised Catholic (Can You Tell?) (1993) make up a series of vignettes, often hilarious, in which the author brings the world of his boyhood to life. Stivender takes us from his confirmation at age eight into his high school years and ends with his preparations for college. His escapades, parents, friends, priests, nuns, and school form a kaleidoscope of images that powerfully evoke an age when the Mass was in Latin and schools confiscated water pistols. Stivender has a gift for describing objects and incidents from a boy's perspective, whether it be the day his father brings home their first hi-fi and LPs, or when he writes to Charles Atlas for tips on how to take out the class bully. He also makes us reexperience the virtual reality of play, for example, when we read how he and his friends were making scooters from roller skates and orange crates and how, racing downhill, his model came apart, leaving him to face traffic on an early form of skateboard. Religion runs through all these pages, mostly in the background, but occasionally the details of Catholic practice appear as objects of wonder that are also taken for granted, as when he describes serving morning Mass inside the local convent. Stivender portrays his priests at school as men of faith who, in different ways, taught their charge to think clearly, even when he was punished for his contrariness by being made to argue for the nonexistence of God in a public debate. Thoughtful as well as nostalgic, Stivender will make readers glad he is still Catholic.
Pub Date: June 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-87483-403-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: August House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1995
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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