Own it she does, with a gutsy, wholly original memoir of ragged grace and raw beauty.
Ray’s redemptive story of an impoverished childhood brings to mind the novels of Dorothy Allison and the nature writing of Amy Blackmarr, but the stunning voice and vision are hers alone.
Ray grew up in a junkyard on the outskirts of Baxter, a south Georgia backwater “about as ugly as a place gets. . . . Unless you look close, there’s little majesty.” She looks close and renders all she sees in prose that’s a treat to ear and tongue alike. Precise, illuminating, and striking, her descriptions of family and nature are salted with the jargon of Southern cracker culture and the gritty poetry of the region’s flora and fauna. Ray’s narrative braids memoir and natural history into a common poignant theme: the search for what’s lost. Moving easily between the cast-off ugliness of the junkyard and the majesty of old-growth forest, she finds ample beauty in each. Exploring her family’s history of mental illness or chronicling the environmental devastation that destroyed Georgia’s once abundant longleaf-pine forest, she’s keenly attuned to the precariousness of systems—the chaos that awaits when they fly out of whack, the difficulty of reassembling them when pieces are missing. She’s blessed with interesting relatives: roguish grandfather Charlie is a legendary woodsman and coon hunter, grandmother Clyo a virtuous woman who bootlegs moonshine to feed her family, father Franklin a mechanical genius who subjects his family to fundamentalist Christianity so strict it prohibits Christmas. Despite poverty and social isolation, Ray recalls her childhood as happy and loving, recounting moments of searing pathos—as when she and her brothers sneak off to a corner of the junkyard to exchange homemade Christmas presents on the sly—without self-pity. “Turning back to embrace the past has been a long, slow lesson not only in self-esteem but in patriotism—pride in homeland, heritage. It has taken a decade . . . to own the bad blood.”
Own it she does, with a gutsy, wholly original memoir of ragged grace and raw beauty.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 1999
ISBN: 1-57131-234-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Milkweed
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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