The pain quotient of this heart-wrenching account is so high that a warning label should be attached: Think twice before...
A son’s unsentimental attempt to unravel the mysteries of his father’s life and come to terms with its contradictions.
Taylor, a lecturer in English at Loughborough University, began writing this memoir after the death of his father, who for nearly two decades had been suffering from Parkinson’s disease and was either unable or unwilling to talk about his past. A few years earlier, the author had discovered that he had a stepbrother, a man whose memories of their father, in his pre-Parkinson’s days, were entirely unlike his own. Taylor reconstructs scenes from his childhood and adolescence to show his father’s downward spiral—from engaged parent to a man so deep in dementia that he could not distinguish his son from a giraffe and believed he was being kidnapped by enemies. Starting in his teens, Taylor began sharing with his mother the role of caretaker. He admits to being impatient, cross, frustrated and angered by his father’s strange behaviors. It was only later when he found clinical names for the symptoms that he could begin to understand what was happening, and with understanding came guilt over his shortcomings as a caretaker. Taylor’s frankness in describing his demented father may be seen as an invasion of privacy, but it is clear that he loved him and wanted desperately to know him and understand him, going to great lengths to track down his father’s relatives, former teaching colleagues and anyone who might provide helpful memories. While Taylor’s father remains something of an enigma to him and to the reader, the unpleasant truths about being a caretaker are made plain, as are the real horrors of witnessing the destruction of a loved one’s body, personality, mind and memory.
The pain quotient of this heart-wrenching account is so high that a warning label should be attached: Think twice before giving to anyone touched by Parkinson’s disease.Pub Date: March 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-86207-955-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Granta UK/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2008
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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