In this memoir of his earliest youth, first published in 1934 in Great Britain, Lord Berners captures the devilish enchantment and perilous anxieties of an upper-class schoolboy, living at home with Mum, and perched on the brink of adolescence and also at the outer limit of the Victorian age. Berners (1883—1950), sometimes called the “English Satie,” eventually enjoyed a glamorous life as a composer, style-setter, homosexual, art-lover, and well-heeled host. But here he plants himself firmly in the “dreadful plainness”of England as it lunged forward into the1890s. Dismal at sport in a world which exalted it, and precociously drawn to the arts (perish the thought!), he was sent off to boarding school at the age of six. He recounts his traumas and yearnings there in humorous and honest detail, casting himself much like “Blake’s little figure . . . stretching out its ladder to the moon.” The unspoken strains of adolescence also vie for young Berners’s attention. At last his dangerous attraction for Longworth (and his first awareness of homosexual longing) is halted in a boyish escapade involving stolen cigarettes and moonlight bathing the school rooftop. Then summer intervenes with its athletic outings, picnics, and family intrigues. Lord Berners reflects on those fortunately —pre-Freudian, pre-Havelock Ellis generations.” His spirit of candor and his literary panache combine to recreate a now-vanished youth, as well as the innocence of a larger bygone age. Out of the “squalid dustbin of school life,” Berners has extricated the stuff of romance. Though his privileged upbringing has often been bashed elsewhere, now it comes in for a well-earned share of nostalgic magic. So close one eye, squint politely, and read the words of Berners as the starry prelude to a life not yet lived.
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1998
ISBN: 1-885983-31-X
Page Count: 243
Publisher: Turtle Point
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1998
BOOK REVIEW
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
