Expressive and thoroughly entertaining.
Humorously irreverent look at life as the eldest daughter of a Southern Baptist preacher whose philosophy, he once told her, “rests largely on the principle that all God’s glorious, perfect children are also dumb as dirt.”
That pious but realistic comment framed Hancock’s childhood attempts to understand the church people around her as well as her own special role as the PK (preacher’s kid) in 1980s Kentucky. Her experiences will ring true for anyone long involved in a church, as she sardonically tells of busybodies and holier-than-thou congregants while keeping the main focus on the sincere believers who were her true beacon, none more so than her parents and sister. A large portion of the memoir pokes fun at the silly and often maddening people found in any congregation, prompting many a good laugh. “Mrs. Pence” came to Hancock’s father to tattle on a nursery worker for having used “the F-word”; asked to spell the dreaded curse, her answer was “f-a-r-t.” All small-town churches have such humorous legends, which the author shares with great effect. But she goes deeper, delving into her own spiritual journey. As a child, she admits self-effacingly, she viewed herself as a prodigy and, with luck, “the world’s first Baptist saint.” Over time, her simple faith was challenged and deepened. During a bout with severe illness, while she endured a painful procedure, her father held her and hummed, not a hymn, but a Crosby, Stills, and Nash song. Her grandmother’s lengthy decline and death revealed both the hypocrisy of their neighbors and the pain her family could endure. Such experiences are the true crucible of anyone’s faith, and they certainly shaped Hancock. The reader comes away hoping that this rueful autobiographer will tap more of her memories in the future.
Expressive and thoroughly entertaining.Pub Date: June 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-59995-708-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Center Street/Hachette
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2008
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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