Though clotted with Briticisms, this keenly felt memoir will evoke tender impressions of childhood in patient readers.
Poignant, loquacious recollections of growing up in postwar, working-class Britain by Gourmet magazine copy chief Haney.
Named for the Labour Party’s winning slogan in 1945, this stylistically knotty memoir focuses on the Cockney relatives of the author’s father, Denis Haney, a “grapher” (telegraphist) from London’s East End. Denis relocated his family to suburban Chipping Ongar, 20 miles outside the city, but they were still eating the unappetizing fare of blue-collar Britons: Kippers, bangers and bacon sandwiches served as madeleines for young John, born in 1954. At the rare family outings to the East End’s Isle of Dogs neighborhood, he was charmed by the rough, chain-smoking bonhomie (induced by hard drinking) of his father’s siblings and extended kin. Plenty of food here too: Pickled onions, cocktail sausages “lined up like fatalities on stretchers,” winkles, welts and prawns were the holiday delicacies at these functions, and the author rapturously devoured them all. Weekly excursions to South Woodford to visit his mother’s father, a barely educated man who grew up in the London slum of Limehouse, yielded exciting, grisly tales of battle in World War I, as well as meals larded with Marmite spread on white bread. John was a bookish lad, and his ambitious, poorly educated mother had plans to inject culture into his upbringing, but he gradually and painfully became aware of class distinctions at the King Edward VI Grammar School and auxiliary military groups such as the Boys’ Brigade and the Air Training Corps. Haney’s reflections turn rueful with his emigration to New York to marry an American. He was far away for the deaths of his parents and various relatives, whose memories arouse acute homesickness.
Though clotted with Briticisms, this keenly felt memoir will evoke tender impressions of childhood in patient readers.Pub Date: Jan. 15, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4000-6233-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2007
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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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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