A bleak, often heart-wrenching account of two children who made their own way during a difficult time with difficult people.
Vaughan’s debut memoir recalls her and her brother’s childhoods.
In this memoir of growing up during the Depression and World War II in Indiana, Vaughan explores her relationships with family members. Her bedrock was her older brother, Genie. Together they navigated their complex school-year lives in Marion, Ind., with two hardworking, stressed parents who couldn’t make ends meet despite their three jobs. Vaughan and Genie spent summers on a 40-acre farm with their loving maternal grandparents and the “Old Ones,” their grandmother’s problematic, not-so-loving parents. Their summers were not bucolic adventures. The near 100-year-old great-grandfather suffered from dementia, occasionally shooting at his great-grandchildren for sport. Their great-grandmother was a mean-spirited harpy who took delight in hurling verbal abuse at her daughter, Florrie. The farm provided the setting for most of Genie and Vaughan’s adventures with a rotating cast of badly behaved animals—mainly acquired by Grandpa in ill-advised trades—that added challenges and hilarity to the children’s summers. Particularly memorable is Big Red, the raping rooster, who was ultimately executed. Genie’s imagination further sustained them; he treated Vaughan as his corporal as they carried out missions around the house to keep it safe from Nazi invaders. Meanwhile, Genie also kept his sister safe from bullies at home. A realistic snapshot of troubled family life 60 years ago, this is book is appropriate for YA and adult readers. The author and Genie garner sympathy as they deal with far weightier matters—abuse, death, deprivation—than children their ages should encounter. Genie was not just his younger sister’s protector and caretaker but a young man admired by his peers, who was able to transcend poverty and self-consciousness. Vaughan’s novel is a tribute to her beloved brother, as well as her loving grandparents.
A bleak, often heart-wrenching account of two children who made their own way during a difficult time with difficult people.Pub Date: June 14, 2012
ISBN: 978-1456375911
Page Count: 224
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
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.
Atlanticsenior 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
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