A charming, insightful account.
In her debut memoir, Bines recounts her volatile marriage while pondering the many influences that bound her to her alcoholic husband for so many years.
Bines grew up in a passionate if dysfunctional French Canadian home. Her mother, a glamorous but unstable woman, was a portrait in extremes who modeled the sort of temperamental alcoholic Bines would later marry. Her father, a mild-mannered man, attempted to keep peace at all costs. Bines qualified as a teacher at a young age and saved money to travel extensively with female friends, immersing herself in other cultures and making rounds on the party circuit. Coming of age in the 1960s, Bines cast aside her family’s traditional Catholic mores to explore her sexuality. She dated a series of decent, unremarkable young men before falling for Dick, who was wild and unpredictable, with a penchant for partying and dangerous pranks. Soon she and Dick married and became parents, and after a series of humiliating incidents and brushes with the law (Dick passed out in his dessert plate after dinner with the boss and drunkenly demolished a ticket booth after a dispute with a parking attendant), Bines realized she married a troubled alcoholic. The story begins in medias res, in a lightning quick series of domestic disputes that took place around the time of Bines’ divorce from Dick. The intensity of these reported conversations, coupled with a total lack of context, is initially confusing. As Bines goes on to describe her upbringing in gloriously vivid detail, however, showing how she gained her independence early in life only to suppress it once more in marriage, she provides much more captivating, fluid reading. Bines’ frank conversational style is both humorous and engaging, as when she tells of her halfhearted attempts to join the swinging ’70s with a game of strip poker: “I started crying….One more hand and I was down to my top and quit. I had a hissy fit and walked out of the room and locked myself in the bathroom.”
A charming, insightful account.Pub Date: July 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499024661
Page Count: 310
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Oct. 20, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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