by John Mosedale ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 1993
Time flies when you're having fun: that's the message of these congenial essays on retirement by Mosedale (The Men Who Invented Broadway, 1980, etc.). Mosedale is a midwestern journalist who came to N.Y.C. and made it. But even though he loved his high-pressure job as a writer for the CBS Evening News, he followed through with his life-plan, which included retirement at age 65 in order to ``do something else.'' When he retired, the ``something else'' was still essentially unformed, though it came to include writing this book; sitting ``around the apartment and watch[ing]'' his wife (who teaches learning-disabled children in their home); nurturing his interests in Shakespeare, opera, and football; and finally organizing his and his wife's book collection. Mosedale also walked every day, enjoyed the birth of his first grandchild, and spent the summer on an island in Minnesota. And he was happy, with no regrets and no itch to get back in harness. These essays mirror that contentment: Reflections on his present days include thoughts on renewing an old friendship; on an AIDS controversy; on the finances of retirement (not important after the fact, Mosedale says, but, then, he's healthy, well provided for, and has lived in the same rent-controlled apartment for 30 years); on finding a long-sought volume of Trollope. Other pieces deal with his past: a battle with alcoholism; his friendship with the late Harry Reasoner; life with two older sisters. At the heart of the book stands his wife, Betty, who's surely what used to be called a ``sainted woman.'' Throughout, commentary and autobiography mingle in graceful, pleasing prose—in fact, a little dissonance might have added more texture to the elegant flow of words. A companionable volume, full of reassurance that family, friends, and a lively intellect can smooth the transition to retirement—to what Mosedale calls ``the sudden silence after the roar of work.''
Pub Date: June 2, 1993
ISBN: 0-517-58641-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1993
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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