The book begins as a rollicking, magical tale but eventually bogs down in too much conjecture.
Stapinski (English/Fordham Univ.; Baby Plays Around: A Love Affair, with Music, 2004, etc.) continues her investigation into her family’s checkered past.
The narrative begins as an enticing page-turner, an investigative jewel sending readers racing to the next clue, as the author strikes out to find the truth about her great-great-grandmother Vita, “a murderess.” A trip to Stapinski’s ancestral home, Bernalda, in the Basilicata region of Italy’s instep, with her mother produced little information and a warning from hostile locals to let the past die. The oral history, jumbled and changed over generations, declared that Vita left for America in 1892 with three children, all from different fathers, losing one on the trip. At the time, a woman traveling without her husband was highly unusual, and the tales that Vita had committed murder compounded the mystery. Stapinski was fearful that her family, and her children, might carry the so-called “warrior gene.” Was the history of aggressive and criminal behavior in her genes unavoidable? Ten years after her first visit, the author headed back to Bernalda, this time equipped with research assistants and translators. A series of serendipitous encounters and acquaintances led Stapinski to a lawyer who knew the workings of the local legal system and, most importantly, steered her to Potenza, where a murder trial would have taken place. After, more digging into documents and local lore led to further questions and few concrete answers. Where were the fathers when Vita’s children were born? How did she lose one of her children? The author includes a cast of characters for “Now” and “Then,” and many of them are vivid and colorful in their own rights, but by the end, the narrative becomes overly imaginative, not grounded enough to satisfy as investigative history.
The book begins as a rollicking, magical tale but eventually bogs down in too much conjecture.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-06-243845-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dey Street/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 19, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2017
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
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