Barely serviceable. Readers will learn a bit about the porn business of the pre-Internet age, but they might as well be...
A plodding memoir of life in 1970s smutland.
What do you do when your father decides to ditch a successful career in investment banking to go into the pornography business, cutting his teeth on the likes of Linda Lovelace? Well, if you’re a kid, you go out and play in the street, eat saltwater taffy at the beach, commune with family and only much later learn about the sordidness of the whole business, courtesy of a helpfully judgmental elder. Battista-Frazee’s father emerges from these pages as a fellow who, like so many of us, is always game to chase after the ever elusive dollar, his ethical sense always situationally located; he also comes off as a bit foolish when it came to his business, wondering why he lost his license in Philadelphia over an obscenity charge in Tennessee, puzzled about why he should have to obtain a liquor license in order to sell booze at the strip club into which he diversified. What’s clear from the outset is that he wasn't a First Amendment champion in the way of Larry Flynt or someone with a desire to shock the bourgeoisie along the lines of Al Goldstein, but instead an unimaginative fellow out to make money. His daughter’s account is similarly unimaginative: If the pornographer in question comes off as a touch hapless, the mother as the definition of long-suffering and the players a collection of Italian-American stereotypes—“I sat at the table complaining about how I didn’t want to eat. (I was an Italian mother’s worst nightmare”)—then the memoirist herself reads as merely ordinary.
Barely serviceable. Readers will learn a bit about the porn business of the pre-Internet age, but they might as well be reading about farm equipment or lumber.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62914-434-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Review Posted Online: Sept. 8, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2014
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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