Khan is little remembered outside analytical circles today. This likely won’t change that, but it provides insight into the...
A psychoanalytical star comes in for close analysis and is found deeply wanting.
Masud Khan (1924-89) came to London in something of the same way Ramu Gupta comes to New York in the 2002 film The Guru, with only a partially formed idea of what he might do but more than enough charisma to squeak by. He was tall—which, as with all things psychoanalytical, would have implications—and handsome, though with a visible deformity and all its implications. He was also very wealthy, and able to use his money and influence to attain what he wished. As psychoanalyst Hopkins writes in this lucid biography, Khan was a brilliant, impassioned student of literature; late in life, he would insist that a friend acquire a copy of Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot and read it carefully and at once, just because he wanted to talk about it. He brought his literary skills to bear as an editor of psychoanalytic literature, including works by Sigmund Freud and, particularly, of the now highly regarded English analyst D. W. Winnicott (“It was part of the collusion between these two men,” writes Hopkins, using a most loaded word, “that Winnicott got most of the credit, even when Khan provided major help”). Khan was also much in demand as a therapist, though as the years wore on he was increasingly given to destructive relationships with women outside his marriage, including at least one patient, for which he was professionally reprimanded. Khan also became an alcoholic, and, though he battled cancer for years, in the end it was drinking that killed him. Hopkins concludes that Khan was “a brilliant interpreter of the self in his patients, but when it came to understanding himself, he was inconsistent.” As are all of us, which makes Khan’s fall from stardom comprehensible, if perhaps overdue.
Khan is little remembered outside analytical circles today. This likely won’t change that, but it provides insight into the works and days of a talented but tormented man.Pub Date: Dec. 26, 2006
ISBN: 1-59051-069-0
Page Count: 568
Publisher: Other Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2006
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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