A thoughtful slice of Americana.
The author’s adolescent diary forms the basis for an unusual memoir.
Spanning the years 1972 to 1977, Sartor’s near-daily entries tread a fine line between embarrassing self-consciousness and endearing candor as they delineate her intimate thoughts. The subjects she tackles are as varied as the cast of characters who inhabit her lively, often unpredictable, adventures. The backdrop is Montgomery, La., a small town in which her father worked as a well-respected physician and her mother raised five children. Sartor’s love life consumes a large number of entries. In the beginning, her 13-year-old affections were confined to her beloved horse Rex, but these feelings were eventually transferred to her high-school boyfriends Jackson and Mitch. From the start, though, it is obvious that Margaret’s one true love was Tommy, her trustworthy best friend and next-door neighbor. The emotional triangle that developed among her, Tommy and Jackson is depicted in the dramatic style only a teenaged girl involved in her first passionate encounters could muster. Aside from her romances, Sartor touches on Nixon’s resignation, civil rights, school admissions, elder care and family conflict. Over the course of five years, young Margaret evolved from an innocent girl who took her blessings for granted into a college-bound young woman wise enough to recognize she didn’t know all the answers. Surprises abound in this simple work. Unafraid to display her negative feelings toward others, the author also attended prayer meetings and regularly wrote about God’s importance in her life. Later, guilt consumed her as she agonized over her flakiness. Sartor was no saint. She drank, dated several boys at once and wrote constantly about her hatred for her nemesis and rival, Bonnie Dell. She knew that her behavior was far from virtuous, and her diary’s truthfulness reveals a yearning heart. In the text, Sartor’s personality changes as the years pass, and this maturation process lends her youthful voice its credibility.
A thoughtful slice of Americana.Pub Date: July 1, 2006
ISBN: 1-59691-200-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 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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