A satisfying mystery that could have been grist for Agatha Christie’s mill.
The art critic for the Observer explores family secrets stretching back 90 years.
In the fall of 1929, writes Cumming (The Vanishing Velázquez: A 19th-Century Bookseller’s Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece, 2016), a 3-year-old girl “was playing by herself with a new tin spade” on a Lincolnshire beach, her mother at her side—until, for a moment, the girl dropped out of her sight and was coaxed away by someone watching nearby, “so fast that she couldn’t have got anywhere near the water.” The girl, who would become the author’s mother, the artist Betty Elston, did not drown; she turned up a few days later. Cumming probes her memory and investigates family albums in an attempt to determine what happened. What she turns up is a secret betrayal on the part of her grandfather to which her grandmother must have surrendered, thinking it “her Christian duty” but likely having had no choice but to do so. The facts of the story and their resolution command attention, but in the end, they’re less interesting than the author’s process of thinking about them. As she looks at photo albums with the eye of a scholarly detective, she discerns patterns of gaps and absences, sees eyes averted, a countenance “reluctant or evasive,” and reads between the lines. Those photographs from the past connect generations in a one-way conversation even as present-day readers, saturated in color, look at monochrome photographs as if the world of their subjects were colorless too: “The mind knows this is false,” writes Cumming, “but the optic nerve is fooled into finding these figures less real, immediate, vital. Monochrome turns the present into the past; makes the past look even more distant.” Her nuanced, pensive account restores reality and vitality to figures from out of the past, making them meaningful while uncovering their secrets.
A satisfying mystery that could have been grist for Agatha Christie’s mill.Pub Date: Aug. 27, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5011-9871-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
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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