Wry, graceful commentary on the oddity of the human condition.
A British writer in search of solitude takes two epic train journeys across the US, only to find herself inexorably drawn into a community of strangers.
Despite an initial claim that her ideal methodology for a travel book would be “to stay at home with the phone off the hook, the doorbell disconnected, and the blinds drawn,” Diski (Skating to Antarctica, 1995, etc.) determines to explore her inner landscape by taking a journey to nowhere in particular and books herself passage on a freighter from England to America, where she takes an Amtrak train from Florida to Tucson. A year later, she returns once more to circumnavigate the US by rail. The three journeys are bound up into a single narrative with two constants: the author’s need to find the smoking car, and the inevitability of connection with her fellow travelers. Be it in the dining room of the freighter where she learns of the death of another passenger’s son, on a train platform in Sacramento where a fellow named “Big Daddy” teaches her a dance routine from The Sound of Music, or in a smoking car where the attributes of leprechauns and pixies are debated, Diski is constantly rediscovering the dangers and seductions of spending time with others. In this temporary and happenstance community, she finds, people's stories tend to tumble out in the first few minutes of conversation. And as the scenery slides by—North Dakota prairie, southwestern desert, southern sugar-cane fields—the author makes a parallel journey through the scenery of her past, visiting the unhappy rooms of her childhood, the psychiatric wards and foster homes of her adolescence. Somehow, this weight of memories and current tragedies (a large number of her fellow travelers seem to be going to or coming from funerals) is anything but oppressive.
Wry, graceful commentary on the oddity of the human condition.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-312-28352-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Picador
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2002
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.
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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