A memoir about the aftermath of violence, from an unexpected perspective. On a balmy afternoon in the late summer of 1988, Kalven received a phone call that effectively blocked out the sun: His wife, a professional photographer and dedicated runner, had been attacked. Rushing to the hospital, he discovered that she had been severely beaten and assaulted, but not raped. His relief, however, was premature. What he couldn—t know that afternoon in the emergency room was that his wife’s assailant had stolen her freedom and faith—qualities that she would never again recover in their original forms. He knew only that she was alive. In the subsequent days, weeks, and years, he gained knowledge of the excruciating process of recovery. In his memoir of the five years following the assault, he documents his wife’s slow, difficult healing as her partner, husband, lover, and professional collaborator. What might have been a testament to one woman’s transcendence of violence is instead a story of a marriage—and the way in which one man attempts to understand how his life has been irrevocably transformed by a single, horrifying event. To his credit, Kalven doesn’t hesitate to write about the ambivalence he feels, his own guilt, his wife’s fury. He grieves openly on the page, for what has been lost, and observes his own conflicted feelings about his gender and sexuality with careful, measured words. And yet the narrative has a curiously static quality; it seems to turn inward again and again in a tightly drawn spiral of self-interrogation. The effect can be exhausting; one longs for a sense of momentum, of resolution. But there is none to be found. In that way, the narrative perhaps echoes the process of recovery too closely; the demands of the form insist on closure whether or not it has been achieved in life.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-393-04690-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1998
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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