Autobiography, like surgery, isn't for the fainthearted. Here, noted biographer Givner (English/University of Regina, Saskatchewan; Katherine Anne Porter, 1982, etc.) coolly dissects her own family, career, and—occasionally—herself. Declaring that ``the writing of an autobiography induces a last-will-and-testament frame of mind,'' Givner proceeds to tell her life story in numbered paragraphs that are as much vignettes as reflections. She recalls her English childhood in a lower-middle- class home where books were rare—the family didn't even own a dictionary—and where gardening and listening to the radio were major diversions. Home for Givner was a place where ``every act- -even the simplest one of eating a meal, choosing a helping of this over that—was subjected to criticism, moral disapproval.'' Her parents were ill-matched, she thinks, with her mother's lack of imagination particularly exasperating. Only the author's success at school proved an escape from a crippling relationship with her parents—particularly her success at college, where she met and married a rich American. Givner elliptically describes the later breakdown of the marriage; her continuing academic success in the US; her move to Canada, where she remarried and gave birth to two daughters; and her teaching career in Saskatchewan. Equally elliptically, she details how her dissertation on Katherine Anne Porter became a book and how she came to write the biography of popular Canadian novelist Mazo de la Roche. Now in her late 50s, Givner ends with an observation that abruptly and disconcertingly undercuts the vehemence of her earlier discontents: ``To go out of your native land and to leave your people is to sustain a great incurable wound.'' Well written, and certainly tart and opinionated, but too narrow and small-scale, offering no riveting insights into writing or even just living.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-8203-1552-4
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Univ. of Georgia
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1993
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
