A bravely introspective tale of wanderlust and lustful wandering.
One woman investigates the life and mysterious disappearance of the promising free-spirited writer Barbara Follett (1914-1939) while attempting to retain her own sense of freedom within her marriage.
As a young woman, Smith “was ambivalent about marriage.” She was not ready to take on the domesticity, set routines, and stereotypical family life that she believed anchored one firmly to a place and responsibilities. Though she loved her fiance and shared his love of adventure, she wondered if there was a way to be together and yet still remain untethered enough to avoid the traditional roles she grew up with. While working on a writing project on Follett, Smith could not help but note the similarities to her own life’s struggles and desires for freedom and adventure. The domestic life was not a good fit for Follett, either, and after months of struggling to win her husband back from an affair, one night she disappeared, never to be seen again. In seeking to avoid the predictability of a traditional marriage, Smith and her now-husband set out to see Southeast Asia for a year while she attempted to discover where Follett went after that night, with theories ranging from sailing abroad to murder. After returning to the U.S., Smith and her husband, appetite for adventure whetted, embarked on a different experiment: open marriage. She admits that “historical examples [of open marriage] hardly suggested it was a path to unalloyed bliss.” In discussing this arrangement, Smith does not attempt to hide her longing for freedom and experimentation under the guise of excuses; rather, she looks deeply and unflinchingly at her motivations and the resulting consequences. With alternating chapters that compare Follett’s life, early adventures, and relational issues with Smith’s, the narrative assumes an interesting mirroring effect. However, where Follett chose to steal off into the night, remaining a mystery, Smith decided to be seen, blemishes and all.
A bravely introspective tale of wanderlust and lustful wandering.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-399-56358-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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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