Thoughtful, evocative and deeply felt, but occasionally lacking freshness.
A writer born in England in 1968 of Ghanaian parents visits Africa hoping to find the source of his malaise and rage—and a place he might call home.
Eshun (director of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts) begins this debut work aboard an airplane to Ghana. Although he had lived there in his early childhood, he grew up in England, where he often felt rootless. He writes bitterly about the racism—overt and covert—that he experienced in England. And he recalls with regret a failed relationship with a woman—a relationship that ended, he feels, because he was unwilling to reveal his history. It is a history that has tormented him both in his waking hours and in his dreams. (One great source of unhappiness: His father had served time as a political prisoner in Ghana.) As the author tours Africa, he pauses to tell the history of the region—with sharpest focus on the slave trade. (About halfway through, he hears from a Ghanaian relative some grim, disorienting news about an ancestor.) Touring Ghana, Eshun also discusses his own biography (and those of his parents) and comments on issues that trouble and even haunt him. He is disturbed by some aspects of the country. He sees young people adopting America’s hip-hop culture. He sees other youngsters wearing Osama bin Laden T-shirts. He visits a fundamentalist Christian church where a crass minister demands cash from his congregation. He experiences what he calls the “Big Man” psychology of Ghanaian men—a social posture of superiority many adopt with those they believe are below them in the human hierarchy. He sees poverty and hopelessness. Much of the writing is lyrical and deeply personal, though some of the author’s epiphanies seem more patent than revelational (e.g., “[I]t came to me that journeys never truly end”).
Thoughtful, evocative and deeply felt, but occasionally lacking freshness.Pub Date: June 6, 2006
ISBN: 0-375-42418-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2006
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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