A memoir filled with pleasing passages in every chapter.
A memoir of unexpected love with a Frenchman.
While living in London as a staff writer for the New Yorker, Collins fell in love with Olivier, who grew up in a beach town near Bordeaux. He spoke English fairly well, but the author spoke no French. In her cleverly organized, well-written story, Collins explores how language differences can be overcome with difficulty but can also threaten romance due to poor communication. Raised in North Carolina, Collins chose London as her overseas locale partly because she lacked confidence about developing a work life and a private life in a foreign language. Due to her sudden interest in Olivier, the author had to find the resolve and the skill to learn French beyond the tourist basics. As the memoir unfolds, Collins does not spare herself, sharing her apprehensions and her missteps with candor and frequently with humor. She also shares her misunderstandings and arguments with Olivier as they labored to reach a comfortable place in a bilingual romance. Collins was also painfully aware of differences other than language. She was a writer, he a mathematician; she was a believer in organized religion, he an atheist. She also acknowledged that her romantic history featured poor judgment in men, even when language and culture presented no obvious barriers. As Collins gradually decided to commit to learning French because Olivier seemed worth the effort, she breaks from the personal narrative to share scholarly knowledge with lay readers—e.g., why is the world divided by so many languages and dialects? How did French develop specifically? What are the sometimes-surprising differences between English, especially American English, and French, regarding sentence structure, gender identification of specific words, and linguistic purity? Throughout, the author ably weaves together the personal and the historical.
A memoir filled with pleasing passages in every chapter.Pub Date: Sept. 13, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-59420-644-3
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: May 22, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
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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