by Kaylie Jones ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 2009
There are a few intriguing tidbits about her father’s social and professional circle—which included Norman Mailer, Irwin...
The daughter of celebrated novelist James Jones weighs in with a loving portrait of her father—and a savage one of her alcoholic, caustic mother.
Jones, herself a novelist (Celeste Ascending, 2000, etc.), adopts a fairly routine chronology, beginning with her birth in 1960 and ending more or less in the present. Between chapters she places stories told by her mother—or about her—which reveal her as frank, eccentric, wacky, dyspeptic, unpredictable and cruel. As the memoir advances, so too do her mother’s failures and cruelties. She forgot to pick up her daughter after school, she said hurtful things (“You’re a whore, you know that?”), drank too much, lied, wasted money and acted outrageously toward all sorts of people, from literary celebrities to her own little granddaughter. Meanwhile, the author began to spiral downward, drinking heavily, sleeping with the wrong people, feeling insignificant and insecure and seeking psychological counsel. Perhaps in compensation, she continually quotes other people who told her that she’s beautiful, talented and intelligent. Jones eventually married good guy Kevin and had a lovely daughter, Eyrna, whose verbal ability, we learn, is “literally off the chart for her age.” In prose lathered with cliché and peppered liberally with evanescent epiphanies, the author seems to see God at one point, then takes up tae kwan do, progresses toward her black belt and becomes so proficient that even some rowdy teens on a Manhattan sidewalk step aside to let her pass. Jones denies the charge that she has enjoyed privileges because of her father, but the facts rendered here indicate that she has received substantial financial and professional advantages.
There are a few intriguing tidbits about her father’s social and professional circle—which included Norman Mailer, Irwin Shaw and Kurt Vonnegut—but most of the narrative is remarkable only for its rancor.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-06-177870-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2009
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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