An often emotionally distant remembrance that still provides some informative historical insight.
A gay man recounts his life and professional career as a plant scientist in this debut memoir.
The author was born in 1927 into a hardworking Presbyterian family and spent his formative years in Illinois and Wisconsin. As a teenager, he writes, he experimented with sex with other boys in the neighborhood and at church camp. These early forays helped him feel less alone, as they let him know that there were others whose desires matched his own. In the Army and then in college, Sinclair found that a few things were consistent: There was always a gay subculture if one knew where to look, and he felt destined to always be a loner, as he was “afraid of being judged for being gay.” Then his life changed course when he was accepted into a doctoral program about plant pathology at the University of Wisconsin and he found his lifelong partner, Elmer “Al” Uselmann. He and Sinclair would spend the next 47 years together, until Uselmann died from lung cancer in 2001. Although Sinclair says that he intended his memoir as a tribute to Uselmann, this fact isn’t clear until the last few pages. Until then, he tells a mostly chronological and bland narrative of his own life, rushing through scenes, simplifying complex emotions, and failing to provide concrete details that would allow readers to better connect to the events. For example, at one point, he vaguely describes his relationship with a childhood friend who was also his first crush: “He and I became fast friends, playing together the entire summer. We bonded.” That said, Sinclair does offer some memorable moments by reminding readers that, until relatively recently, sex between men was illegal in many states. It also succeeds as a tribute when Sinclair writes that because of his relationship with Uselmann, “I will not hide this love.” (Includes occasional black-and-white photos.)
An often emotionally distant remembrance that still provides some informative historical insight.Pub Date: June 22, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5246-9628-3
Page Count: 136
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2018
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
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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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