Cosmopolitan and decorous throughout, selective as it should be, and written with engaging style.
A mature writer who has revealed much of herself in poetry (The Ghostwriter, 2000, etc.) now, in sharp prose, tells more of her life’s story.
The daughter of a British village doctor, MacInnes summons up, as in any proper memoir, her father and mother, her boyfriends, her horse, and her little dog, too. In the days when young ladies went forth in hats and gloves, “fresh and green as a salad,” she went up to Oxford. During WWII, she served as a WREN driver. Then she joined the circle of bright young things around poet John Wain, about whom we learn a good deal, not omitting the condition of his fistula. After the war, she moved with new husband John McCormick and his son to Berlin, whose residents had changed little since Isherwood’s time. From Berlin, they emigrated to New York and after a while to Mexico City, where McCormick pursued his academic career and added to his interests a devotion to the manly art of confrontation with brave bulls. Then he took a post in New Jersey while sending his growing family to Maine. Just as MacInnes grew to appreciate the attractions of the Pine Tree State, her husband moved them to New Jersey, where she taught in the local community college. It’s quickly obvious that McCormick was no homebody, more clueless Agamemnon than thoughtful husband, gone frequently and for protracted periods. Indeed, until the final pages, there is scant evidence of uxorious regard in his relationship with his understanding spouse. And a person of considerable understanding and insight MacInnes certainly appears, at least in her own account, taking pleasure in her three children and whatever is natural. Her outlook is always feminine, rarely rigorously feminist, though the title of her signature poem, “I Object, Said the Object,” is revealing.
Cosmopolitan and decorous throughout, selective as it should be, and written with engaging style.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-42068-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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
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