Narrow in scope, this homeless tale still offers a testimonial with undeniable value.
A first-person account explores homelessness in Massachusetts.
Lough opens his debut memoir in 2012 as he faced the prospect of living on the streets for the first time at age 53. The author recounts his trials while he navigated the rules and regulations of several shelters. Each one stipulated a different maximum length of residency and minimum period between stays, which added to the sense of revolving doors. Lough comments: “Compared to the six-day time period at Ally’s and two weeks at the Harvard shelter, ninety days at the Brewster seemed like real security.” When he couldn’t afford car repairs, this setback created a dependence on public transportation and severely limited the jobs he could accept. Lough’s frustration with this vicious cycle is palpable, especially when a shared ride to a job site got him into trouble (marijuana usage in the car was the issue, although the author did not partake) and affected his ability to sleep at a particular shelter. During one of the periods between shelters, an abandoned van became a godsend, his only chance to keep relatively warm and dry that night. It was unlocked and unoccupied, contained a mattress, and remained undisturbed until daybreak. Throughout the text, the author also includes bleak images of some of the locations he frequented during this time. After 18 months, Lough’s previously learned skills as a handyman offered him a way out when he found a steady job as an onsite building manager performing maintenance duties. To his credit, the author successfully conveys a precarious existence—at once monotonous and fraught with uncertainty. The only caveat about this gritty work regards the calibration of the reader’s expectations in light of a phrase from Randall Shaw’s Foreword (“an unvarnished look at the culture of homelessness”) and the broad subtitle, both of which could be a bit misleading. It may not be possible to extrapolate Lough’s experiences to other geographic locations or facets of identity such as race (he’s Caucasian), gender, or age. This memoir is a case study with significant details about everyday concerns, not a place for grand sociological theories. This is not to diminish its worth but rather to acknowledge the actual breadth of the project.
Narrow in scope, this homeless tale still offers a testimonial with undeniable value.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-4917-8297-2
Page Count: 104
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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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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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