White makes the case that loneliness deserves attention and respect as a legitimate condition.
For research lawyer White (Law and Society/Memorial Univ.), loneliness was not a transient mood but a life condition with crushing implications.
Loneliness affected the author early on in life, with her fears of empty places, especially her home after school—siblings out, mother at work, father a weekend dad through divorce. White experienced the afternoons as a frightening isolation, just when she was starting to define herself as an individual. The author approaches her sophisticated inquiry from a variety of angles: biological, cultural, social and psychological. In the medical world, loneliness is an ambiguous condition, only now becoming recognized as a distinct state of being. There have been studies about its genetic basis, as well as its physical debilitations, such as lowered immunity, premature aging and high blood pressure—all of which are easy to understand as White painstakingly sets about detailing her persistent sense of isolation, lack of intimacy and embarrassment. “Loneliness,” she writes, “at the start of the wired-up twenty-first century, was so totally nowhere, so crushingly uncool.” The author was both beseeching and incredulous at the existential absurdity of it all—“As my need for others intensified, I began to retreat from them.” When social situations presented themselves, she became stressed at interacting, so she would spend more time alone. The power of White’s story comes from the sweeping investment she has made in tracking and tackling her loneliness—an investment that has included Jungian analysis, hypnotherapy, bowling clubs, bike trips, Internet dating and much more.
White makes the case that loneliness deserves attention and respect as a legitimate condition.Pub Date: March 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-176509-4
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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