by Herbert Gold ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 2008
Good, acerbic reading imbued with the writerly spirit the author has expressed for nearly half a century.
A working novelist well into his ninth decade, just about the last of the San Francisco Beats, offers a smart and philosophical valedictory.
Gold (Daughter Mine, 2000, etc.) rose to literary fame 41 years ago with the bestselling Fathers: A Novel in the Form of a Memoir, and his latest—which is pretty much a memoir in the form of a novel—still provides worthy entertainment. He does not, as an octogenarian might, lament the ubiquity of cell phones or the evident collapse of civilization as he once knew it. He writes rather of loss, love and life, focusing on friends who are gone, fleeting encounters and those he long cherished. In no particular chronology, the author flashes back to his excessively politically correct pals in hip California; to his Jewish childhood in Lakewood, Ohio; to Columbia University, where he got some education; and to the Army, where he got some more. He spent time in mythic postwar Paris, an expatriate on the GI Bill hanging with difficult Saul Bellow; he sojourned in Haiti with colorful foreigners. Gold introduces us to the ghosts of his beloved brother, an adored wife and friends heard once again through the tinnitus of accumulated years. He savors the lingering fragrance of the days when he “consented to be very young, very happy.” He recalls the dear children, the divorces and the causes of yesteryear when he was middle-aged. As solipsistic as any memoirist must be, he’s also rather repetitive, but merely for emphasis, he insists.
Good, acerbic reading imbued with the writerly spirit the author has expressed for nearly half a century.Pub Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-55970-870-8
Page Count: 264
Publisher: Arcade
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2008
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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