May 4, 1991, was ``Eugenia Price Day'' on Georgia's St. Simons Island—a 75th birthday and general ``I-Love-You-E.P.'' celebration organized by the writer's friends and publishing company. The occasion so moved this author of 37 books (among them inspirational titles and historical series like the Savannah Quartet) that she paused while working on her follow-up to Bright Captivity (1991) to write this little thank-you note to all the people who made her what she is today—a very successful writer indeed, with hundreds of thousands of fans whom she thanks right along with Doubleday president Stephen Rubin and her agent, editor, sales reps, typist, and yardworker. Along the way, Price reveals some fascinating personal facts- -that she and her longtime companion, Joyce Blackburn, bought burial plots on St. Simons before they bought their house; that Price named her Buick LeSabre after the protagonist of the Savannah Quartet; and that she includes God (``Him'') while making publishing decisions with her agent. To Price aficionados, it will make sense that, as a reader, the author prefers biographies to fiction (since her own novels favor character over plot), though it may prove disappointing to hear how Price delegates research tasks. But, mostly, fans will hold this valentine to their bosoms, even though Price warns that establishment critics will find it ``schmaltzy, dripping with sentiment.'' Well, yes—not to mention a little too ingenuously good-willed. But there's a broader lesson here: Price has spent three decades listening to her own creative voice, never trying to be all things to all people—and so she has endured. (Twenty b&w photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: May 19, 1992
ISBN: 0-385-42321-7
Page Count: 96
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1992
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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