by Eugene Walter with Katherine Clark ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 21, 2001
A fitting memoir, told with dash and brio, from a unique and fascinating character.
A life well worth remembering is finely displayed in this oral autobiography of Walter—writer, poet, set designer, songscribe, editor, actor, etc.—as told to Clark (Motherwit, not reviewed).
Most of all, though, Walter (who died in 1998) was a boulevardier, a man about town, a man who others sought out for the sheer pleasure of his company, learned and mischievous, capricious and shrewd, a man whose wayward life was guarded by the fates and utterly serendipitous. He tells of growing up in sensuous, prodigal Mobile, Alabama, where “the porch was a concept as well as a place, and people used them,” and we follow his trajectory first to New York (where he lived in Greenwich Village, cavorted with Dylan Thomas, Martha Graham, and Maureen Stapleton, and worked in the theater), and then to Paris (“Let’s see what’s over there. Let’s just have a look”), where he got serious about writing, contributing to the early Paris Review after looking up Plimpton, Matthiessen, and Donald Hall, and winning awards for his short work, novels, and poetry. Then came Rome—Walter relates all this with incredible gusto, a strong and steady comic touch, and, one imagines, much elegant embroidery—where he edited the widely respected literary journal Botteghe Oscure, wrote music for Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits (and acted in 8 1/2), and took roles in dozens of spaghetti westerns. Like the best of tricksters, he has taken an oath of awareness—he is incredibly sharp—and he is lovable as well as fascinating: His was a wonderful life that couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.
A fitting memoir, told with dash and brio, from a unique and fascinating character.Pub Date: Aug. 21, 2001
ISBN: 0-609-60594-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2001
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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