A vividly rhythmic chronicle of reconciliation couched with a 1960s rock-’n’-roll soundtrack.
A successful literary agent recounts her life and especially her relationship with her father, who was “a mass of contradictions: a pacifist and a tyrant, an optimist with demons, a hippie and a conservative, a proud father and jerk, and a boy and a man.”
Hosier (co-author: Hit So Hard, 2017) has long dealt with unresolved “daddy issues,” but she thought she had tucked the baggage neatly away—that is, until her mother sold the family home and, salvaging the last few childhood relics, the author dug out a Beatles-heavy stack of inherited records. After that opening scene, Hosier proceeds to detail her life story, one closely intertwined with her father, who reared the household on the entire Fab Four canon. “The Beatles records…had provided the soundtrack to our lives and seen us through every great joy and tragedy,” she writes. “Dad and I used those songs to both connect with and escape from each other, to both understand and rebel against each other.” Titled with songs from “Blackbird” to “Hey Jude,” each chapter reveals chronological milestones that shaped the author’s coming-of-age in rural 1980s Ohio. Underneath what seemed an idyllic “Here Comes the Sun” childhood stirred a controlling father who became increasingly volatile. Eventually, writes Hosier, life became “the anxiety of constantly walking on eggshells, the need for order and control, [and] the impulse to try to save others while losing [myself].” Permeated with events like church boot camp and school graduations, the narrative is near cinematic with insights about gender roles, love, and sex gained through experiences involving her parents, romantic relationships, God, and rock music. Struggling through a host of various traumas both minor and major, her mother’s inability to break free, and her father’s battle with cancer and eventual death, Hosier delivers a memoir that is less about chasing an identity and more about having one cast upon her and coming to terms with it.
A vividly rhythmic chronicle of reconciliation couched with a 1960s rock-’n’-roll soundtrack.Pub Date: Feb. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4495-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Dec. 10, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2019
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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