An intriguing peek into a piece of Americana that will likely appeal mainly to derby enthusiasts.
A debut memoir offers a decade’s worth of insider stories from a roller derby star.
Early on, Smith says he is writing this book for the many roller derby “fans who love the game and travel four hundred to five hundred miles to attend matches in their area.” Indeed, this is a work for devotees, those familiar with the rules and terminology, not to mention the players, of a sport that seems to have reached its peak in the early 1970s. It is also for his fellow skaters, who should thoroughly enjoy the recollections. Other readers may wish to Google a glossary of the lingo to follow along. Still, the author offers plenty of captivating tidbits for the nonaficionado. Smith has a compelling personal story to tell, and the on-track and off-track antics of the professional men and women who willingly endured all manner of broken body parts to partake in the joy of skating remain quite astounding. The back stories of heavy drinking and fast driving could put today’s bad-boy athletes to shame, although there is a noticeable respect for women among this group. Smith describes a violent combat sport, with fans happy to join in the mayhem. After 1973, the derby became scripted: plays and fights were prearranged, and that’s when Smith and his then-wife, Francine Cochu, a derby star in her own right, decided to retire. The author examines the uniqueness of roller derby: teams comprised a men’s group and a women’s group, and the final outcomes were determined by combining the two scores; players drove from town to town in 16-to-17-day spurts without a break; the team had to set up and tear down its own derby tracks in each town; and the skaters received terrible pay. Smith delivers what is really a series of vignettes, often forsaking chronology for the memory of the moment, so there is considerable jumping back and forth in time. This sometimes results in a tedious repetition of events and personal history that should be summarized in the second or third mention rather than repeated. But his text turns out to be comfortably conversational, best in small doses.
An intriguing peek into a piece of Americana that will likely appeal mainly to derby enthusiasts.Pub Date: Feb. 20, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4917-8017-6
Page Count: 244
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2016
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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