An uncommon tale of brotherly love, and a passionate defense of the notion that dignity belongs as much to the mad as to the rest of us. Like Susan Sheehan's Is There No Place on Earth for Me?, this volume enters profoundly into the life and suffering of a man with a severe mental illness. In this case, however, novelist Neugeboren (Before My Life Began, 1985, etc.) is writing about his younger brother, Robert, who was first hospitalized at the age of 19, after trying to kill his father. Robert's life acutely poses the question of when, and how, originality and eccentricity prefigure and finally cross the border into madness. Robert was a charming and gifted child during the Neugeboren brothers' boyhood in Brooklyn in the 1940s and '50s. (Robert's wit and gentle spirit are everywhere manifest in the letters, quoted here at length, that he wrote from various institutions.) But finally eccentricity became disorderliness and confusion, and Robert began a lifetime's journey in and out of institutions where he was treated by an ever-changing but consistently incompetent cast of therapists, on and off of a pharmacy-full of medications, in and out of the latest ``miracle'' treatments. How did the promising boy who beguiled everyone with his song-and-dance routines become the man whose narrow life centers on halfway houses, menial work, and occasional visits to Atlantic City? Neugeboren, who rejects the reduction of mental illness to biochemical imbalances, explores their family's troubled past (a father who was a failure as a breadwinner, a domineering mother who scorned her husband, doted on Robert, and denigrated Jay), and his own adult life as the brother of a mentally ill man, single father of three children, and son of a mother with Alzheimer's. A rich, textured, and deeply sad tale emerges, enlarged by Neugeboren's persistent belief that in telling Robert's story, he can ``be a witness to his life, in all its complexity, uniqueness, hope, and despair'' and make it ``fully human.'' (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-688-14968-5
Page Count: 305
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1996
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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