A fairly humorless recollection of a hardworking mother, but still an affecting homage to “the boundlessly life-affirming...
Playwright Reyes (Theater/Arizona State Univ.) casts a grateful eye on the past and his mother’s many sacrifices in a strange land.
An immigrant from Chile in the turbulent 1970s, María brought her “love child” along with her, a boy whose father had at least given his son his last name—“and this fact, my mother convinced me once, pulls me up a notch or two in the hierarchy of bastardom.” María is a thoroughly complex woman, diligent, intelligent and hopeful for a life as a teacher of language and literature. Instead she ended up cleaning houses in Los Angeles, where, in one shining moment, she snuck a snapshot of herself holding the Oscar awarded to a client for producing the movie Annie Hall. For years she told stories of having worked for that famous film tycoon, though finally she confessed that it had really been a friend who was employed by the Hollywood rico. Meanwhile, Reyes was growing up conflicted because of his homosexuality, not to mention the embarassment he felt toward his mother during his teens. Reyes confesses much later, as María lay dying in hospice, that he felt “estranged from her final days,” but not, in the end, from her, who did nothing but sacrifice for him. Much of the book, too, has an estranged feel, a kind of narrative flatness extending over a story that has only a few critical moments. “You write as if you had an accent. You sound foreign on the page,” noted one playwriting classmate. Here, however, Reyes often sounds merely detached.
A fairly humorless recollection of a hardworking mother, but still an affecting homage to “the boundlessly life-affirming memory of her.”Pub Date: May 27, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-299-23624-3
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: March 1, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2010
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
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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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