Angry and paranoid, with moments of stylistic clarity.
Long-winded but frequently beautiful memoir traces the author’s evolving identity, from childhood in upper-middle-class suburban Minneapolis to joining the desperate struggle against apartheid in South Africa and beyond.
Wilderson (African-American Studies and Drama/Univ. of California, Irvine) moves erratically through time. He begins with the startling moment in Johannesburg, where in 1995 he learned that Nelson Mandela believed he was a threat to national security. But soon we are hearing about his first visit to South Africa in 1989, when a journalist urged 33-year-old Wilderson to come and bear witness to apartheid. He worked for several years in the ’90s as a writer for the African National Congress, recording eyewitness accounts of violence against black people in the townships and sending them to Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Wilderson was an outspoken, well-read Marxist given to lecturing the underground militants he worked under, namely white Trevor Garden and black activist Stimela Mosando, who ran guns and ideas for the ANC’s more radical arm. The author fell in love with and married a young law student named Khanya. They lived briefly in New York, but she disliked the covert racism she found there. Back in Johannesburg, they endured the violent repercussions of black politician Chris Hani’s 1993 assassination and were eventually torn apart by ideological discord. Alternating chapters cover Wilderson’s seismic awakening to racism in America as the child of one of the only black families in well-off Kenwood, Minn.; his adolescent activism in the ’60s; his studies in African literature at Dartmouth; his ten years as a stockbroker; his decision to become a teacher and writer. His account of a long affair with an older white academic provides perhaps more information than most readers will want, but it fits with Wilderson’s mission to be brutally honest with and about himself.
Angry and paranoid, with moments of stylistic clarity.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-89608-783-5
Page Count: 500
Publisher: South End Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2008
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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