by Mark Edmundson ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 4, 2010
A near-perfect memoir.
Edmundson (English/Univ. of Virginia; The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days, 2007, etc.) delivers a wily, playful, self-denigrating memoir.
In this erudite, coming-of-age riot, the author deftly navigates the purgatorial rites of passage between university and professional life, developing insightful social critiques and candid self-evaluations along the way. After graduating from a collegiate “hippie” hideout in Vermont (Bennington), the author drifted into seedy, mid-’70s Manhattan. There he met Pelops, his streetwise guide who disapproved of the author’s bourgeois character but took the young Edmundson under his gargantuan wing, shoveling generous piles of philosophy, particularly Marx, onto his plate. Pelops also hooked him up with a job as a roadie for rockers like Alice Cooper and the Allman Brothers at Roosevelt Stadium in New Jersey. As the memoir develops, however, the famous lyricists and musicians of the introductory chapters recede into the background. Edmundson writes that “rock recharges the Will…the appetites for pleasure, power, sex, fun, freedom, what have you.” Though the “kings of rock and roll” hand over the tools and lyrical schematics, writes the author, the rest is up to us. Inspiration springs from every page, as the author revels in his renaissance-manliness—“how many other bouncers stand at the door of the discotheque and memorize Browning poems?”—and proves to be an honest, poetic and hilariously entertaining narrator.
A near-perfect memoir.Pub Date: May 4, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-171347-7
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Dec. 5, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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