Slim, quiet family history: no more, no less.
An unembellished, straightforward and modest genealogy–based on oral interviews, diaries and family artifacts–of a mixed-ethnicity family in rural Oklahoma.
As a third-generation Japanese-American exploring her family’s immigrant origins, first-time author Nishimuta’s primary concerns are closer to those of a historian than to a biographer. The author records, with little adornment, the experiences of her Japanese grandfather, Kutaro Nishimuta, and her Spanish grandmother, Louisa Patrocinio Lorenzo, throughout early 20th-century rural America. The author provides voices to her sources, seven descendants of Kutaro and Louisa. Nishimuta dodges many of the pitfalls of the amateur biographer–extrapolating, elaborating, drawing reckless conclusions–mostly by reigning in her own analyses to her central query of how her interracial family survived despite economic, social and political adversity. The mechanics of the author’s writing, too, are comprised of the barest essentials, the sentences clipped and spare. Her narrative attention is fixed on commonplace details and familial anecdotes rather than on sweeping, historical panoramas. In a chapter devoted to Kutaro, for example, Nishimuta recounts such ephemera as the cost of a bottle of whiskey in 1907 (around 75 cents). Nishimuta’s disengaged-yet-intimate narration is appropriate for a book concerned with exploring, rather than dissecting, the largely unmapped cultural landscape of rural Japanese-Americans, and especially for an author who, as she writes, claims no single ethnic origin and often feels like an outsider looking in. If the reader wishes for more texture or variety (Nishimuta’s principal linguistic ornamentation seems to be the word “very”) or more ambitious analyses, if Nishimuta’s research leans decidedly toward Japan (the Nishimutas in America have lost touch with their Spanish relatives in Spain, she explains), and if several paragraphs’ worth of homage to 9/11 feel weak and tacked-on, these are minor quibbles. In a time when distances between generations are often wider than that between nationalities–especially within the families of American minorities–Nishimuta’s account is a subtle reminder that when it comes to defining identity, no details are unimportant.
Slim, quiet family history: no more, no less.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2006
ISBN: 0-595-37543-X
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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
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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