by John Paul Lewis ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 16, 2013
Appealing and intelligent, a noteworthy memoir that amiably captures one man’s experiences in an earlier American era.
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Successful businessman Lewis details his remarkable life story in this charismatic debut memoir.
Rooted by a deeply religious, humble beginning in 1930s Lubbock, Texas, Lewis describes a childhood when home refrigeration required blocks of ice, when now-vaccinated diseases such as polio were a real threat, and World War II had tremendous effects. He learned a strong work ethic through the efforts of his parents, who encouraged a 9-year-old Lewis to get his first job selling ice cream from his bicycle. That ethic stayed with Lewis as he worked a series of often arduous jobs to help make ends meet at home. He details his schooling, which included public, boarding and correspondence schools, as well as a long break to work in Hollywood, where he met an astonishing array of radio and movie stars. Lewis’ college career followed a similarly circuitous pattern that included a four-year break to serve in the Air Force. To pay his way through school in Washington, D.C., Lewis worked as an elevator operator in the House of Representatives, allowing him access to politicians at the highest level, including five presidents. Eventually, Lewis began his career in earnest in the banking industry, specializing in international finance. His work took him across the globe, and he provides illuminating details about complex and sophisticated transactions. The book is filled with colorful, often fascinating stories, such as how Lewis and his parents drove across the Mojave Desert in a time when cars had no air conditioning and the roads still contained vestiges from the old wooden road used by much earlier travelers. In fact, almost every chapter includes such additional stories, but rather than being merely tangential, they unfailingly add depth and provide a clear sense of perspective to Lewis’ life and personality. His prose is conversational and artless, and he even manages to make intricate financial projects more understandable to average readers, although those with an MBA may occasionally have an edge. He discusses his personal relationships with candor, even when discussing tragedy and loss.
Appealing and intelligent, a noteworthy memoir that amiably captures one man’s experiences in an earlier American era.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-1491027868
Page Count: 338
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 30, 2014
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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