Uncertain in focus, but replete with sincerity and well-written anecdotes.
A memoir of a daughter’s relationship with her mother, a talented, strong, manipulative and vicious artist.
To hear Sis’s mother tell it–which she does often and loudly–she is a famous artist who single-handedly raised five children, nurturing them successfully from childhood all the way through college, forsaking her own personal needs despite the harsh strictures of the Great Depression. Sis’s version is a bit different–she agrees that her mother did indeed support the family after her husband could no longer find work through a mixture of artistic talent and questionable business practices (amidst painting drop curtains, Sis’s mother fleeced customers and smuggled booze). But the portrait Sis paints is not of a loving parent who sacrificed for her children. After Sis’s father committed suicide, her mother divided the family and farmed out her children to various relatives and institutions, so that she could enjoy a Bohemian lifestyle–living with her boyfriend, shooting pool and striding around in men’s clothing, all unheard-of in that era. When, decades later, nightmares awaken troubling memories, Sis must search through her mother’s innumerable lies for the truth of her childhood. Part biography, part autobiography, part period piece, part suspense story, part reclamation of an abusive childhood, part assertion of independence and part apologia, Skunk Stew could easily have become a vengeful refutation of a mother now deceased. Instead, the author writes with such generosity that her–demonstrably unrequited–love for her undeserving mother, despite her many failings as a parent, shines through. That despite her corrosive role model, Sis appears able to love her own family with an open heart untainted by bitterness, is little short of a miracle.
Uncertain in focus, but replete with sincerity and well-written anecdotes.Pub Date: March 4, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-595-47671-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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