If ever a human life was a palimpsest, it was that of William S. Burroughs. Caveney’s (Shopping in Space, not reviewed) captivated biography begins with the premise that there is no knowing Burroughs without proper understanding of the myths that so insistently grew up around him; in literature, as in agriculture, the weeds say something of the soil. Caveney, a British literary scholar, is an able deconstructionist and fine writer, very much up to the particular biographical challenges presented by his subject. He notes that Burroughs’s forgettable undergraduate years at Harvard —appear to have been spent cultivating the art of invisibility, casting himself as a fugitive from an establishment of which he was a part.” Judiciously quoting Burroughs throughout, the author lingers over the thousand familiar stories about him, seems even to relish them as the primary source material this study requires. While the reader will be occasionally unpersuaded by the kinds of induction upon which Caveney’s analysis depends, the methodology is eminently useful in its discovery of the cultural nerves that Burroughs, wittingly or not, repeatedly struck. Neither is there a shortage of the more local biographical detail—who met whom, and when, and where—to which all chronicles of the Beat movement and its denizens succumb to greater or lesser extent. Caveney, for his part, is copious but not overbearing, expanding his scope to incorporate Burroughs’s influence on figures as disparate as the late rock musician Kurt Cobain, poet John Giorno, and novelist Terry Southern. Mention must here be made of the book’s remarkable graphic design. Its cut-and-paste aesthetic (with text superimposed over art) is a mirror of Burroughs’s own that, rather than distract the reader from the text, quietly reinforces the extent of this legacy, which perhaps has always been less about literature than spectacle, the odd event of seeing life enact itself over and against the words we use to describe it.
Pub Date: June 15, 1998
ISBN: 0-316-13725-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1998
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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