Although some pieces are slight, on the whole, reading Schwartz is like a pleasurable visit with a thoughtful and articulate...
A literary New Yorker shares her memories.
Novelist, poet and essayist Schwartz (Two-Part Inventions: A Novel, 2012, etc.) has gathered mostly previously published pieces on subjects ranging from childhood memories to taking an African drumming class to listening to Anthony Powell’s books on tape. Many are essays of self-discovery, efforts to dig “for the shards of…early delusions” and the sources of her easily incited anger, competitiveness and impatience. Growing up in Brooklyn in the 1940s and ’50s, Schwartz and her friends spent long Saturday afternoons at the movies, usually arriving in the middle of a feature. They watched, not certain about the plot until they saw it through at the next showing, leaving whenever they could say for certainty, “I think this is where we came in.” The reader undergoes a similar process in fitting together disparate “glimpses” into a full portrait. One essay focuses on the author’s cherished baby grand piano, an extravagant purchase by her parents, that she has moved wherever she has lived; another, on the quality of her parents’ marriage and its hidden intimacies. She reflects on the nature of friendship, on her youthful belief in humankind’s essential goodness, and on her knee-jerk response to blame someone or something for malevolence. “Blaming was a comfort,” she writes, “and comfort was high on our scale of values….If villains could be found to blame for everything, then evil could be localized and kept in check, like an epidemic.” The idea of evil permeates her recollection of a shattering visit to Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela and other political prisoners were held during apartheid. Two of the strongest essays focus on recent events: heart surgery to replace a valve, which generated months of severe depression; and her delicate parsing of love for a grandchild.
Although some pieces are slight, on the whole, reading Schwartz is like a pleasurable visit with a thoughtful and articulate friend.Pub Date: March 11, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-61902-246-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Counterpoint
Review Posted Online: Dec. 7, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
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
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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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