Still, a glimpse into a world that few readers know firsthand—and good thing for them.
“Sometimes I wonder if magical thinking is my alcohol,” writes Blaine, a crisis interventionist in Nashville, in this self-aware, literate memoir of adventures in the para-shrink trade.
Anchorless as a teenager, but pretty sure he didn’t want to break a sweat for a living, the author took a job at a mental hospital in college, assured that he would get decent pay, free meals and plenty of time for study. What he got was an education in how terribly sad the human mind can be when in a state of illness, as with an early encounter with a “vampire girl with stars tattooed around her eyes swearing I am the holy one, the chosen son, and she wants to bleed me badly but she is so afraid that she wants to and it is very so very important that I know how much she needs to bare her teeth into the softest part of my neck and slowly grind them together until they produce the richest of blue-black juices….” The mental ward led to a suicide hotline and other avenues into that sad world, and all the while, Blaine wrestled with plenty of demons and worldly sins of his own, filtered through a particularly flinty kind of fundamentalism that fell away in sheets in the face of reality. After time in the trenches, the author reflects on the book of Job and concludes that the “whole wager thing between the devil and God is scary and just doesn’t seem fair.” Blaine’s memoir is likable and often compelling, if he sometimes strains too hard for a laugh; its chief flaw is that it is too long by nearly 100 pages, studded with false endings that suggest that he found and then abandoned points at which to break off.
Still, a glimpse into a world that few readers know firsthand—and good thing for them.Pub Date: April 1, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-77041-108-1
Page Count: 324
Publisher: ECW Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2013
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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