by Frances Mayes ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 2014
One of those books you want to devour but realize it’s more satisfying to savor for as long as possible.
A captivating memoir by Mayes (Every Day in Tuscany: Seasons of an Italian Life, 2010, etc.) recalling life growing up in a small Southern town and how the region permeated her psyche.
Though the author fled southern Georgia when she was a young woman seeking an alternative vantage point for experiencing life, the departure from her small hometown did not come without internal turmoil. “When I left the South at age twenty-two, the force that pushed me west was as powerful as the magnet that pulled me,” she writes. The author landed in the San Francisco Bay Area, “the optimistic bellwether for the country,” and called Italy home for a time. Eventually, Mayes built a life as a wife, mother, author and teacher. During a stop in Mississippi, the South once again forcefully insinuated itself into the author’s consciousness: “I’m pressed to know: why the exuberance and melancholy attacked me, why the abrupt heart flips, why the primal rush of memory, why this physical magnetism that feels dangerous….” Mayes and her husband then departed California for North Carolina. Larded with deliciously evocative sensory memories, the narrative dissects the author’s early years growing up in a loving yet turbulent family; her parents’ alcohol-fueled, long-troubled relationship; the verdant landscape dappled with hints of menace; the notion of home; and the role place plays in developing the psyche. Mayes recounts her childhood when she “didn’t know the word ‘racism.’ Black/white polarity was the God-given order of things.” She finds it “impossible to relive that state of mind.” Mayes recalls how the restrictive social atmosphere at the all-female college she attended chafed yet also provided space for developing a strong core self and lifelong female friendships. The author also captures the trauma of her father’s premature death followed by her mother’s long, sad decline.
One of those books you want to devour but realize it’s more satisfying to savor for as long as possible.Pub Date: April 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-0-307-88591-3
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: March 4, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2014
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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 Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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