Lacks originality or punch—recommended to readers looking for a light, unchallenging autobiography.
A pleasant but unexciting memoir of growing up Irish Catholic in New England.
Psychiatric nurse O’Hara (Last of the Donkey Pilgrims, 2004) nostalgically recounts his childhood and teenage years from the 1950s onward. The author was born in England to Irish parents, but his growing family, which would eventually include eight children, moved to Pittsfield, Mass., in 1953. The O’Haras made their home in the living quarters of their local church parish, where the author’s father worked tirelessly as a janitor and his mother was a homemaker. The staunchly Roman Catholic family was very close and worked hard. These circumstances provide the basis for this episodic memoir, in which O’Hara tells a wide range of stories touching on family, religion, parochial school and young love. He writes of his mother’s struggles with depression, which put her in the hospital more than once; of guiltily stealing dimes from the family savings jar to buy candy; and of stern nuns who warned their young students that “[l]ooking at dirty books will leave you reading the classics in braille.” He also chronicles his later teenage years, when he worked as a golf caddy, and, in a bit of a detour, his stint in the Air Force during the Vietnam War. The narrative pace is brisk, and the author maintains an unassuming, amiable tone throughout. Many of the stories are quietly amusing or nostalgic, but they’re also more than a little bland. None are laugh-out-loud funny or cut particularly deep. Readers may also get the distinct feeling that they’ve read these kinds of stories many times before—many of O’Hara’s tales of ruler-wielding Catholic-school nuns are a bit shopworn.
Lacks originality or punch—recommended to readers looking for a light, unchallenging autobiography.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-7653-1803-9
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Forge
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
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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