Amid his mother's dying from brain cancer, the loss of his job, and a doctor's diagnosis that his case of the ``meat bucket blues'' was ``treatable'' depression, Middleton (On the Spine of Time, 1991, etc.) finds renewal in fishing the wild waters of cold mountain streams. Fired in June 1990 from a sportswriting job with the Southern Progress Corporation (he replays over and over his firing by his ``friend the CEO,'' whom he'd just given a fly-fishing lesson), Middleton heads to Denver, where he spends two years working on ``county garbage truck No. 2'' with a former professor of medieval history who was fired for stealing a turkey from a barbecue spit. The author attends weekly therapy sessions with one Lilly Mutzpah, who tells him that his depression is ``inherited, genetic, a kind of sadness passed along from generation to generation.'' In Denver, he also befriends ``Swami Bill,'' who wears an apple-green monk's robe and sports a stuffed parrot on his shoulder. The swami and his ``main squeeze,'' Kiwi LaReaux, run the Holistic Motor Court, Ashram, and Coin Laundry. Middleton fishes the South Platte, then heads to the nearby Sawatch mountains, which, Kiwi says, exude ``cosmic amounts of invisible pure crystal healing energy. But you gotta breathe deeply.'' She and the other zanies Middleton meets prepare him—as well as the reader—for the painful, graphically depicted death of Middleton's mother. Her eyes—turned bright blue from cancer treatments—as well as the clouded eyes of a blind trout provide obvious symbols for the author's new insights into himself. Fly fishing meets the New Age in this uneven work that veers from the sublimely ridiculous to the heart-rendingly profound.
Pub Date: Aug. 19, 1993
ISBN: 0-671-75859-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1993
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
