An artful, sad account of growing up in a family of troubled writers.
Memoirs of a muted girlhood.
To those born into a family of artists, the hand of fate can sometimes be as cruel as it is kind, at once bestowing gifts of brilliance, access and community alongside the substantial psychological and aesthetic burdens that often accompany creative genius. Few know this better than Garis. The eldest of three children of playwright, magazine editor and aspiring novelist Roger Garis, she is also the granddaughter of Lilian and Howard Garis, authors of the wildly successful early 20th-century children’s series The Bobbsey Twins and Tom Swift. As such—and particularly after her grandparents moved into her family’s lavish Amherst home when the author was eight—she witnessed firsthand a jarring juxtaposition between reality and the “happily ever after” domestic bliss enshrined in her grandparents’ tales. At first, Garis writes, “I was inside the boundless optimism…when I looked around my own life, I saw something so similar in its physical outlines to that mythic ideal that fictional boundaries tended to fade away in my unformed, overactive mind.” But she soon found that while her grandfather, “the robust fabulist who spread delight among us,” proved to be as benevolent as his most famous character, Uncle Wiggily, her grandmother was a demanding, asocial shrew with a damaging tendency to belittle her son. Coupled with his father’s immense creative productivity, Roger’s lifelong feelings of inadequacy eventually devolved into a relationship-shattering combination of paranoia and an addiction to Sodium Amytal, which Garis devotes much of this memoir to analyzing.
An artful, sad account of growing up in a family of troubled writers.Pub Date: July 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-0-374-29937-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2007
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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