A bit about old television and a bit more about being Irish, all proficiently presented.
Toronto Globe and Mail television columnist Doyle debuts with a memoir featuring, among other things, an account of what he watched on the telly in the old country.
As a lad in Tipperary, young John witnessed the advent of TV in Ireland. For him, puberty and modern life arrived simultaneously: Bat Masterson and The Donna Reed Show, The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Get Smart gave way only to airing of the daily angelus. Schooled by the Christian Brothers, he found the world of church, communion and confession informed and enlarged by broadcasts from elsewhere. “It was a mad, carefree way of life those people were living in America. They were afraid of nothing.” Not everyone was happy about it. As one politician famously declared, “There was no sex in Ireland before television.” And, while English Monty Python flew into Irish homes with its circus, more immediate matters also appeared on the screens. There, before all eyes, was the new rising against English rule in the North. Along with Upstairs, Downstairs, TV showed the struggles for Irish rights and women’s rights. It also deferentially presented the first papal visit to the land of St. Patrick, one broadcast that didn’t meet with the author’s approval. Despite all the evocative detail, television is simply the cement that binds a personal coming-of-age story. Doyle was quiet lad who watched and listened avidly to his parents and the colorful townsfolk in Nenagh Town and Carrick-on-Shannon. Then he was a Dubliner, a college student encountering famous poets and drinkers. Finally, he traveled across the Atlantic to become a Canadian, though he’ll always be an Irishman. Doyle writes with fine Hibernian garrulity and ease, not a bother on him. For an Irish narrative, he’s yer fella.
A bit about old television and a bit more about being Irish, all proficiently presented.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2007
ISBN: 0-7867-1814-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2006
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
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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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