The author’s talents as a historian far outweigh his abilities as an autobiographer.
A long-time Newsweek journalist piggybacks his life’s story onto the most important news event of his career: the turbulent drama of the civil rights movement.
Unfortunately, though, Fleming’s brilliance as a journalist is strangely at odds with his weakness as a memoirist. Clearly more comfortable recalling the violence of the struggle for racial equality, he offers vibrant portraits of the most harrowing incidents of that era, including the enrollment of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi, the investigation into the disappearance of three civil rights workers near Philadelphia, Miss., and the funeral of Martin Luther King Jr. in Atlanta. These sections stand out with sharp observations of body language, vocal inflections, political maneuvering, street theater and the steely determination of both civil rights agitators and segregationist status quo enforcers to plant their politics on the landscape. Strangely, though, Fleming’s attempt to tell his personal story is less compelling. Born in 1927 in North Carolina, raised for most of his childhood in a Methodist orphanage (even though his mother was still alive and healthy), he escaped poverty and isolation through a late-teens stint in the Navy and then became a reporter. Yet he fails to enrich the account of his own life with the kind of revealing detail he brings to his historic coverage. The two stories that brought him his greatest national exposure, as the victim of a vicious assault during the 1966 Watts riots and one of those fooled by the D.B. Cooper hoax, are presented in an antiseptic and detached manner. His narrative of the post-Newsweek years sweeps along in an elusive rush lacking emotion and specificity; he casually, almost accidentally, drops in an account of being hospitalized and treated with electroshock therapy. It would seem the story of Fleming’s life is the dramatic news events he covered, not the life itself.
The author’s talents as a historian far outweigh his abilities as an autobiographer.Pub Date: May 10, 2005
ISBN: 1-58648-296-3
Page Count: 368
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2005
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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