Tales from a one-time Southern Baptist.
Cain’s memoir begins with promise in a gripping prologue. The reader meets the author in the midst of his young son’s desperate hospital experience, as the boy clings to life and the parents cling to sanity. The author hoped to receive some assistance from his parents, aging Tennessee Baptists a world apart from their New York City son, but his request was met only with excuses and an eventual brief and uncomfortable visit. Readers begin to understand that whatever has passed in the intervening years, Cain and his parents are no longer family except in name. Apparently drawn to his memories through the trauma of his son’s illness, the author recounts various episodes from his boyhood and adolescence in Chattanooga. The book proves to be a page-turner, but Cain disappoints in two key ways. First, his vignettes are meant to pique the reader’s interest in Southern Baptist culture, but little of what is shared is particularly unique. Second, where the author does introduce meaty subject matter, he fails to deliver with introspection or analysis. For instance, in one scene Cain recounts being trapped in a car during a race riot, but aside from sharing the memory and the realization that race problems would not go away, he leaves the reader wanting more. As Cain prepared to enter college, he was obviously happy to be leaving, even fleeing, the culture of his youth. However, his transition from overly pious Evangelical teen to James Joyce–quoting, humanist college freshman is abrupt and unexamined. Though laced with interesting characters and descriptive writing, Cain’s memoir could have delivered so much more. Pleasantries and pathos, but not a lot of point.
Pub Date: April 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-307-46394-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
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 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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