The occasional outburst of adult themes notwithstanding, this makes good reading not just for Conroy’s fans, but also...
In which the beloved American novelist Conroy (1945-2016) speaks from beyond the grave, sometimes in the saltiest of language.
For close to 200 hours, biographer and novelist Clark (The Headmaster’s Darlings, 2015, etc.) turned on the tape recorder and let it roll in the presence of the loquacious Conroy, who obliged, providing a wealth of observations, anecdotes, shaggy dog stories, and complaints. The last are not many, but like many writers, Conroy keeps a running score of injuries, insults, and bad press. Though he professes not to read his reviews, we all know better than that; in any event, he tells a pleasing tale of running into Gail Godwin, who “gave me a horrible review for The Prince of Tides in the New York Times,” and laughing off the encounter as a well-earned scar, to which he adds that he’s not one of those to be scared off by the opinions of others, even if other voices have been stilled by timidity. The passages on military school and growing up in the service are especially revelatory. In one of the wisest of his remarks, Conroy ventures that “much of what we do in life is repair work on our childhood.” Certainly, that was the case in his breakthrough novel The Great Santini and, to a lesser extent, in books such as The Lords of Discipline, the latter of which, he recounts, caused Gore Vidal to remark that it “could have been a good book if only I’d known that all those guys were gay.” Conroy is unguarded and refreshingly open on many matters of the flesh, as when he remarks that going to Catholic school “fucked up everything connected with my dick and my brain.”
The occasional outburst of adult themes notwithstanding, this makes good reading not just for Conroy’s fans, but also teenagers seeking a literary path out of the confusion as well as grown-ups reckoning with their own lives.Pub Date: March 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-61117-907-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Univ. of South Carolina
Review Posted Online: Jan. 8, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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