A harmless, wholesome treat for those who don’t mind a little treacle.
Author of the bestselling Marley & Me (2005) shares his candy-coated personal history.
Grogan opens with memories of his “wondrous” youth, guided by a mother who awakened each of her four children with the tickle of a feather and some lighthearted teasing. The author recalls having inexhaustible energy while growing up in metropolitan Detroit, somewhat to the chagrin of strict but loving Mom, who made valiant attempts to rein in her preteen powerhouse. On a typical vacation, known as a “family miracle trip,” they would camp out after spending the day visiting religious shrines and monasteries. The Grogan family was fervently religious, which may explain why the author became so mischievous at an early age. He spied on a topless neighbor sunbathing in her yard, cultivated crushes on teachers in his particularly sadistic parochial school and indulged in cigarettes, fireworks and mild neighborhood vandalism. Humorous situations saturate the narrative: his brother Michael’s early affinity for the priestly life juxtaposed against Grogan’s own predilection for the female bosom; his parents’ radical frugality; various altar boy calamities; a lip-mauling kiss from “Lioness Lori…an overzealous make-out partner with braces.” Experimentation with drugs, sex and petty crime soon followed, along with the dogged pursuit of writing, launched with a vulgar underground publication that landed him and his high-school cohorts in hot water. Post-college, Grogan got writing gigs at various newspapers in random locales. He also acquired a non-Catholic girlfriend: his future wife Jenny, with whom he cohabitated before getting married, which both bewildered and disappointed his conservative, judgmental parents. Although much of the book describes Grogan locking horns with his parents over varied, mostly religious differences, after his father’s leukemia diagnosis it becomes a mushy testament to the power of love, forgiveness and growing old gracefully.
A harmless, wholesome treat for those who don’t mind a little treacle.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-06-171324-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2008
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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