Hassler (Emeritus, St. John’s Univ., Minnesota) gives readers an over-the-shoulder glimpse at the creative process, self-doubt, and elation that accompanied the first of his nine novels, Staggerford (1977). In 1975, with six short stories having brought 85 rejection slips, a restless Hassler requested a one-year sabbatical from teaching English at a community college in Brainerd, Minnesota, in order to realize his dream of writing a novel. The result was Staggerford, a tragicomedy about a high school teacher that has now gone through 15 paperback printings. Despite his success, however, Hassler presumes too much in expecting his loyal following to snatch up what is essentially grist for a luncheon speech or a magazine article. Instead of providing glimpses of the embryonic ideas, structures, themes, and descriptions that crop up in the journals of John Cheever or F. Scott Fitzgerald, these journal entries sound already worked over for publication. Hassler does show how writers, in tenaciously grasping general principles of the craft, can still flounder. In fleshing out —The Bonewoman,— for example, he remarks that he knows how she looks, but not how she sounds: —You need more than one sentence from a person to get a good grasp of her voice, its timbre and tone.— Other entries, less valuable to aspiring writers, catalogue the minutiae of an author’s routine (—I go through a lot of contortions when I write. I jump up from the typewriter and stride around the table. I flit from window to window—). Too often, Hassler stuffs these inventories with autobiographical filler, reflecting on his lonely sojourns in an isolated cabin and the reactions of family and friends to his crazed, but ultimately triumphant, pursuit of an impossible dream. When he focuses on the writer’s craft, Hassler can be wonderfully revealing. But the rest of this could have been saved for the family album.
Pub Date: Dec. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-345-43288-6
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2000
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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