Narrow appeal, but nevertheless an endearing look at two inseparable lives.
A densely packed memoir written by a tag team of twins.
Debut memoirists Joe and John Gindele were born in 1944 in the Yorkville section of Manhattan, where they lived through high school. Their parents were immigrants, father from southern Germany, mother from Czechoslovakia. Eventually, they were a family of seven—four boys and baby sister Mary Ann—living in railroad flats in old brownstone tenements where not having to share a bathroom with neighbors was a big deal. But the Gindeles were hardworking and thrifty, ethics they passed on to the kids; one thinks of the cliché that they never realized they were poor. Readers get a panorama of city life in those days—games they played (almost always out in the street), jobs the kids hustled, good times at their summer getaway on a farm in Connecticut—while meeting neighbors and following the boys through scrapes literal and figurative. Slowly, the Gindeles moved upward, finally buying a car, a ’51 Chevy. Always there was the immigrant’s drumbeat: education, education, education. After high school, the boys headed west to Minnesota, where they had family connections, and there they remained, now retired from teaching, with matching doctorates—the American dream come true. But for one year in college, the Gindele twins have been living together the whole time, now for over 70 years. The writing here, while adequate, isn’t terribly graceful, and the tone is chatty and sincere: “Dad thought you had to yell into the telephone for it to work. So he did. It took some time to convince him that he only needed to speak in a normal voice.” The book is chock full of family photographs, grainy but more authentic for it. And the twins prove to be avid researchers: footnotes abound, and there are appendices in the back, including one for further reading and one reflecting on what it is like to be twins.
Narrow appeal, but nevertheless an endearing look at two inseparable lives.Pub Date: June 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9839337-6-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Golden Valley Publishing, LLC
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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