In this occasionally overwrought but often moving memoir, Boelte ends with a different perspective than when he started.
An extended meditation on fog, perception, memory and mortality.
This debut is even more ambitious than it is elliptical, as Boelte tries to come to terms with the suicide of his older brother when both were teenagers and with the nature of fog, both as a physical manifestation and as a metaphor. He compares memory to fog in “how it obscures the world, confusing the seen and the unseen. And then, how it slowly disappears from sight until the world is once again visible.” The prose can be a little too preciously poetic, overly conscious of its effect, but the narrative has a powerful anchor amid the mists of fog—the brother who committed suicide, perhaps in response to the LSD he had been using and then caught dealing, half a lifetime ago for the author. There’s a catharsis within this narrative strand, as the author remembers what he had previously blocked and comes to terms with what was once familiar but has been lost in the fog of memory. There is little in the way of chronological progression, as the story jumps back and forth among the fog-bound present in San Francisco, the coming-of-age (and death) in Colorado, and the legacy of fog in the historical annals. The metaphor almost collapses under the thematic strain, but just as it seems that Boelte has circled back a time or two too many, he shows that he knows what he’s doing, evoking the philosophy of the great painter Mark Rothko: “If a thing is worth doing once, it is worth doing over and over again—exploring it, probing it, demanding by this repetition that the public look at it.”
In this occasionally overwrought but often moving memoir, Boelte ends with a different perspective than when he started.Pub Date: Feb. 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-1619024588
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Soft Skull Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 14, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
PROFILES
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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