An intriguing, sometimes-rambling yet courageous memoir.
Her mother’s death prompts a writer to examine her relationship with her family.
Though having previously relied on her prodigious imagination to create stories to help “make sense of the world,” award-winning novelist Nunez (Fiction Writing/Hunter Coll.; Boundaries, 2011, etc.) here opts to forego fiction’s veil to explore “the real truth, the essential truth” in her first full-length memoir. Called back to her native Trinidad on the occasion of her mother’s death, Nunez loosely frames this probing look at the varying dimensions of her family’s relational dynamics across the four days between returning from New York on hearing of her mother’s passing and her burial. The fog of grief following sudden loss, coupled with heady interactions with her ailing father and gathering siblings, provides a ready backdrop for the author to expound on topics as disparate as Trinidadian history, pedagogy, colonialism, Catholicism and her love for British literature. She also assesses the lasting impact of her parents’ values and relationship with each other on the lives of their 11 children. Nunez analyses the conventions that she feels rooted her “rigidly orthodox” Catholic mother in a 65-year marriage to a loving and accomplished but at times unfaithful husband and her fierce adherence to religious doctrine that resulted in 14 pregnancies and may also have contributed both to her difficulties in openly expressing affection for her children and her encouraging them to travel abroad to seek their fortunes. Taught early on by both parents that “emotions can be dangerous; they can derail you,” Nunez contemplates how this emphasis on emotional reserve may have spawned her and her siblings’ great professional successes alongside a raft of failed marriages, especially when faced with a once-domineering father now diminished by age, widowed and in the early stages of dementia.
An intriguing, sometimes-rambling yet courageous memoir.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61775-234-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Akashic
Review Posted Online: April 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2014
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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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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