Debut author Currey-Wilson takes TV seriously, but never herself so much.
An entertaining, inspiring and decidedly countercultural account of parenting in a media-crazy world.
From the moment she became pregnant, Currey-Wilson decided to shield her child from television. That was easier said than done. TV seemed to shadow the baby even before birth. During labor, his mother got into an argument with a midwife who thought that the television might provide distraction from her contractions. When little Casey finally arrived, Mom began to realize that she’d set herself quite a challenge. She still enjoyed TV herself and snuck in a show when Casey napped or was cared for by Dad, but her son watched almost no television before his sixth birthday. His teachers credited some of his unusual academic aptitude to the fact that he was reading or playing when other kids were zoned out in front of Barney. Yet this book’s most fascinating sections don’t have much directly to do with Casey. The author’s television turnoff sensitized her to the important place TV plays in friendships and even familial relationships. She got along best with her somewhat difficult mother, for example, when the two were parked in front of the tube; once TV time was limited, they struggled to find a new way to interact. Her stance also affected her bonding with other new mothers, who felt threatened and judged by her TV rules. As Casey got older, she worried that his friends’ moms didn’t want to have him over to play, since they knew he would rather draw or jump rope than watch a video.
Debut author Currey-Wilson takes TV seriously, but never herself so much.Pub Date: April 20, 2007
ISBN: 1-56512-539-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2007
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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