Enlightening insight into a creative mind that may stifle some readers but that adds further mystique to a unique persona.
A memoir from the acclaimed writer and visual artist.
Guggenheim fellow Dodge is a well-known artist whose work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among other venues around the world. For literary sorts, however, he may be best known as the singular presence in his partner Maggie Nelson’s inventive memoir The Argonauts, which described the relationship between two incredible artistic creators. Dodge’s memoir is in no way linear, which may make it difficult to work through for some readers, and there’s little context to the material. The book, he writes, “was drafted, in large part, using unaugmented recollection as a primary source; some of the resulting inaccuracies have been purposefully left uncorrected.” Throughout, the author discusses Nelson and her book and provides affectionate passages about their children. The narrative, presented in clipped entries that don’t always cohere, jumps decades among the late 1970s and the present. One of the main themes is death, as Dodge considers the passing of his parents (“the place where my mom died was a nightmare. It was industrial dying, industrial death”), but there’s also plenty of existential trivia, with long, considered opinions on movies like Blade Runner, Arrival, and arcane films from the past. Dodge displays a wildly creative voice, opining on the remarkability of coincidence, the nature of individual intelligence, and the titular meteorite at the center of the narrative, which the author seems alternatively obsessed with and horrified by, depending on the moment. Ultimately, the text reads like a diary, compelling yet fragmentary confessions that might concern children at one moment and graphic, anonymous sex in another. Readers who like the voice will find plenty of intriguing bits about movies, books, and a somewhat psychedelic visit to Six Flags, but strangers will be wandering into unknown territory.
Enlightening insight into a creative mind that may stifle some readers but that adds further mystique to a unique persona.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-14-313436-7
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: Nov. 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2020
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
