At the age of 66, the author finds connections among these pieces that are stronger than those readers might discover.
A wide-ranging collection of literary essays in the guise of a memoir.
“At the center of [this book],” writes prolific poet, novelist and essayist Skloot (The Wink of the Zenith: The Shaping of a Writer’s Life, 2008), “is an attack of unrelenting vertigo that began—out of nowhere—on the morning of March 27, 2009, and ended on the evening of August 12, 2009, as suddenly as it had begun. Those 138 days seemed so anomalous, such a weird and isolated period in my life.” Well, yes and no. As it turns out, a viral attack in the brain some two decades earlier might well have presaged the vertigo, and some hip problems the author later suffered initially seemed equally out of the blue. Yet less than half of these essays (most previously published though often revised here) deal specifically with issues of health and disorientation, and some of the best—“Senior Speech,” about the stigma of speaking Brooklynese, and “The Bottom Shelf: On Novels I Keep Trying and Failing to Read” (by Styron, Bellow, Mann et al.)—work better as stand-alone pieces than in contributing to a larger thematic whole. Perhaps best of all is “Anniversary Fever,” which combines Skloot’s deep appreciation for poetry (and T.S. Eliot in particular) with a sense of how “the marking of anniversaries…helps me find order in a world that can be snarled and chaotic for anyone, not just for the brain damaged, or to find harmony in the jangle and dissonance of experience.” More than once, he shows a father’s pride in the success of daughter Rebecca’s best-selling The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: “I’ll admit to having twenty-seven foreign and five American editions.”
At the age of 66, the author finds connections among these pieces that are stronger than those readers might discover.Pub Date: March 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-299-29950-7
Page Count: 220
Publisher: Terrace Books/Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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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