A slim volume on the learned truths of living with limited vision by a man for whom the printed word has been the mainstay of both his professional and private life. Grunwald (One Man’s America, 1997), former editor-in-chief of all Time, Inc., publications and under President Reagan US ambassador to his native Austria, first wrote of his fading sight in a 1996 New Yorker piece, “Losing Vision.” That article is the genesis of the present work. Once diagnosed with age-related macular degeneration (AMD), he began to learn everything possible not only about his condition but about the history of eye diseases and their treatment, and he shares some arcane tidbits here, describing ancient Egyptian remedies and revealing how the eye injuries of WWII fighter pilots led to refinements of cataract surgery. On a more personal note, as Grunwald’s vision fades, he becomes a “visual glutton,” storing up precious images of beloved faces and scenes. He dredges up visual memories from his childhood and muses about the art of seeing, the remaining pleasures of museum going, the hazards and rewards of traveling, the difficulties of ordinary social intercourse when eye contact is missing, and the enormous frustration involved in reading and writing. Perhaps the most poignant sentence in the book is his quiet lament, “My books are still more than furniture, but less than the living things they used to be.” While the physical effects of AMD are formidable, he has found the emotional ones more troublesome. He admits to bouts of anger and depression, but tries to fight back with humor and by making a game out of the need for coping strategies. In the process, he has learned patience, humility, and, reluctantly, acceptance of membership in the society known as the “handicapped.” Grunwald’s eyesight may have become cloudy, but the picture he creates for us is crystal clear.
Pub Date: Nov. 3, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40422-8
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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