From nonagenarian expatriate Green (The Green Paradise, p. 1233, etc.): a collection comprised of essays, lecture notes, and a short story written in 1920, when the author was a student at the University of Virginia. Like papers retrieved from a trunk in the attic, a few of these pieces carry a whiff of the antique—but there's also much to savor and enjoy. Born in France to American parents, Green grew up bilingual, although—as he admits in ``An Experiment in English''- -``as a child I could not believe English was a real language, to me the real names of things were French.'' This dichotomy leads Green to analyze the difficulty of writing in another language; the way in which language shapes material; and the challenges that writers face in exile. He cites a poignant encounter in wartime London with his great friend AndrÇ Gide, who wanted to ask a bus conductor for directions; though Gide could talk easily with English-speaking literati, he was ignorant of colloquial English. This subtle difference between language and nationality is further explored in ``Translation and the Fields of Scripture,'' while, in ``On Keeping a Diary,'' Green writes about the difficulty of telling the truth as well as of giving an accurate self-portrait- -``one of the most hazardous occupations because it involves the whole of a man's personality, good and bad.'' Other notable pieces include a lecture on ``How a Novelist Begins''—which remains relevant and fresh, as do ``Eight Lectures on Novel Writing''—and a memoir, ``As I Look Back,'' recalling Paris between the wars and Green's friendship with writers like Gide and Cocteau. The short story (``The Apprentice Psychiatrist'') and some recollections of now-forgotten French writers and literary salons have not worn as well. Elegant evocations of a golden age when writers wrote—and lived well—in Paris, which truly was the city of light.
Pub Date: Jan. 30, 1993
ISBN: 0-7145-2956-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Marion Boyars
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 1992
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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