Puzzling digressions overshadow this memoir’s powerful subject matter.
A woman comes to terms with the disturbing events of her past.
“I used to say that the town was called Fleet,” Goodeye writes about her childhood home, “because people seemed to be fleeting away.” Fleeting is an apt word for many elements that make up her debut memoir: it describes the aforementioned town in the vast region of Alberta, Canada; the book’s slightly disconnected prose style; and the many chances at happiness in that author’s life that slipped away time and time again. The author, when she was 3, had her mother get sent away to a mental institution. Unfortunately, the therapies of the day failed to help her mother, and Goodeye lost her to suicide a few years later. After moving from a small farmhouse to a university and, eventually, a home with her husband and four sons, the author moved on with her life until tragedy struck again. Her husband’s sudden death put her in a downward spiral that eventually led her to Bob, an artist and craftsman who brought his world of “drugs, music, art, creativity, and no limits” to her quaint country life, and whom she later married. She writes that Bob’s free-wheeling lifestyle soon revealed deep mental issues that eventually led him to suicide, as well, leaving the author once again to regroup and rebuild. She immersed herself in aboriginal culture and the pursuit of a new degree in social work, which presented her with difficult challenges on the path to confronting her past. Goodeye fills the pages between tragic events with seemingly random encounters and small details that she says remind her of certain time periods: a man she met on the road with whom she later shared letters, a galvanized tub in which she used to bathe, and many other objects and fleeting experiences. This gives readers a series of impressions rather than a sustained narrative, and the moments are hit or miss, sometimes creating powerful, relatable effects and at others, simply confusing her timeline and detracting from the emotional, difficult story she attempts to tell.
Puzzling digressions overshadow this memoir’s powerful subject matter.Pub Date: Dec. 13, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4917-1400-3
Page Count: 262
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: July 13, 2015
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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
