A warts-and-all Missouri family album with many side trips to conflicts in the Pacific and school-administration offices.
Debut memoirist Brown writes of his Depression-era upbringing, his World War II experience in the Pacific, and the ups and downs of his later civilian existence in education.
Brown, an American veteran of the air war in the Pacific and, later, an educator and youth counselor, makes repeated references to newsman Tom Brokaw’s definition of “The Greatest Generation” as he reflects on his own life. He grew up in the 1930s in Depression-hit Sedalia, Missouri, as the son of a well-liked local businessman. As a child, he had only one store-bought toy (a small replica of a bank), but he says that he didn’t feel particularly deprived. A talented, wiry young athlete, he had to overeat and drink lots of fluids on short notice in order to meet the minimum weight requirements for shipping out after Pearl Harbor. He preferred piloting over the onerous routines of foot soldiers, and he flew harrowing missions in the Pacific in Patrol Bombing Squadron 33 and participated in the liberation of the Philippines. Following the war (and a welcome home with little fanfare) he taught music in hardscrabble Missouri, often working with kids with disabilities; he happily reports some success stories here. The political and generational unrest of the 1960s seemed to affect his own family, and Brown’s hasty wartime marriage ended in divorce, granted on the author’s birthday in 1974; he co-wrote this manuscript with his second wife, Judith. At times, this memoir appears to lean toward defensiveness, aiming barbs at the author’s ex-wife, his estranged adult children, and academic colleagues who fell short. Even so, Brown writes that he’s had a great and “blessed” life, despite career-crippling, late-onset hearing loss, possibly caused by his many hours near deafening aircraft engines during the war. Although many accounts of combat brag about superior technological innovations, Brown instead writes of “ordinary people doing an extraordinary job with outdated, obsolete equipment and with thin supply lines thousands of miles long.” For him, teamwork, cooperation, and his own Depression-tempered resolution and religious faith were key not only to military victories, but also to his own successful mentoring of troubled students. The “ivy” in the title is a metaphor: it refers not to elite East Coast universities but to the way that such vines support one another.
A warts-and-all Missouri family album with many side trips to conflicts in the Pacific and school-administration offices.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4809-2679-0
Page Count: 364
Publisher: Dorrance Publishing Co.
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2016
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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