A wryly eloquent memoir of world travel and the joys, and difficulties, of returning home.
An award-winning writer’s account of a life lived in flight from a Louisiana birthplace that ultimately drew him back.
A fifth-generation New Orleans native, Nolan’s (Higher Ground, 2011, etc.) Southern roots ran deep. But by 1968, he realized that his birthplace was as much a “jailhouse” as the psychiatric ward where his mother’s doctor had temporarily confined him for the rebellious behavior he saw as “sick.” After his girlfriend and an ACLU lawyer helped him get out, he took a Greyhound bus to San Francisco. There, he befriended members of the theater group the Cockettes and lost his “gay cherry” in the process. After trips to Colombia, Nolan then became involved in political protests against the American government’s nefarious involvement in Latin America, especially the democratically elected government of Chile. By the mid-1970s, he had become an itinerant professor, fallen in love with a dancer, and moved to Guatemala. His association with political dissenters led to arrest and incarceration, but his escape-artist talent saved him from “certain death” yet again, and he was able to go free. However, like the forebears who had “move[d] across oceans” in the 19th century to establish a life in the French Quarter, Nolan soon found himself doing much the same. His first crossing was to Spain then, a few years later, to China, a country from which he fled after a semester of teaching at a university where he was excluded from planning a revolution for which he hungered. Eventually he returned to New Orleans only to watch his birthplace, already caught in a “boozy maelstrom of guns and drugs, murder and corruption,” struggle in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Filled with eccentric characters—many of whom Nolan memorializes with included black-and-white photographs—and outrageous situations, Nolan’s work also offers serious, often sardonic reflections on such diverse topics as race, family, consumerism, progress, and the fate of a generation of countercultural idealists.
A wryly eloquent memoir of world travel and the joys, and difficulties, of returning home.Pub Date: March 1, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-4968-1127-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2017
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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