A terrifying bout of blindness stirs up recollections of a dark family story in this moving memoir. In the spring of 1991 Gorman lost sight first in one eye and then in the other, victim of a rare optic-nerve disorder. In her last hours of seeing, she pored over old family photos, fixing faces in her memory and recalling especially her beloved older brother, Robin. Diagnosed as an autistic and considered beyond help, Robin was institutionalized in 1961 at age 12. The author's memories of that family crisis and of other events in Robin's short and tragic life are artfully woven into the story of her own blindness. The grandson of a noted ophthalmologist and great-nephew of the poet Ogden Nash, Robin spent 12 years in a mental institution and was working as a dishwasher when he was killed by a car at age 31. Cut off from her own world by blindness, Gorman came to understand her brother's awful alienation. ``In my blindness,'' she says, ``I found my brother again and I followed him in his childhood footsteps. I stood inside his shadow and occupied his darkness.'' In the chapters recalling scenes from their childhood, Gorman skillfully adopts an ingenuous narrative voice, describing, with the naivetÇ of the child she was then, Robin's anguish, her mother's sadness, her father's and grandfather's firmness, and everyone's silences. It is an affecting account, as is her story of her own mysterious blindness. Gradually her sight does return, though imperfectly. The story comes full circle when she finds among Robin's belongings a piece of amber glass, one that he used as a child to spot crabs underwater, and discovers that with his ``seeing glass,'' colors sharpen, shadows appear, and once again she can read. Two memorable stories in one. (First serial to Good Housekeeping and Reader's Digest; Book-of-the-Month Club selection)
Pub Date: June 2, 1997
ISBN: 1-57322-061-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1997
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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