A long, minutiae-driven memoir about family and mental illness.
A debut author recounts his struggles with adoption and depression.
Smith grew up in the 1960s and ’70s in the town of Harvey in western Australia, the adopted child of a family of dry cleaners. Learning of his status caused great confusion in the life of the young boy: “I became very self-conscious of this, and it played on my mind all the time. I thought, How could someone so strong and great just be given away?” Smith recounts his childhood and adolescence: playing saxophone in a band, failing at talking to girls, hunting kangaroos, and apprenticing as an electrical fitter. Through it all, however, obsessive compulsion, anxiety, and depression were taking root in his mind, making him particularly sensitive to life’s flaws. During a stressful house-building project in his 20s, Smith sunk into a depression that ground his life to a halt. He then began to seek professional help for his condition while pressing into new areas of experience, including patronizing prostitutes, joining a football club, and finding out the names of his birthparents. Meeting his birth family and learning to take better care of himself, Smith began to slowly find a way to exist in the world. Smith’s prose is sharp, if somewhat dramatic: “The year 1990 was the beginning of the end for me with respect to my innocent life; all my weaknesses were ruthlessly brought to the foreground.” His verbosity is evident from the length of the book (over 400 pages), but the author is willing to let other people speak as well. The work includes long passages written by Smith’s mother, his psychologist, and one of his former band mates. The memoir is further supplemented by family photographs, grade school report cards, lists of badminton tournaments in which Smith competed, job time sheets, an explanation of the author’s zodiac sign (Leo), and over 40 pages of transcripts from his sessions with two clairvoyants. In fact, Smith includes so much material (none of it terribly interesting) that no real narrative emerges. The author has cataloged his life, but there isn’t much for the reader to take away from it.
A long, minutiae-driven memoir about family and mental illness.Pub Date: April 24, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5035-0987-0
Page Count: 426
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: July 5, 2017
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
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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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