An impressive display of misery tinged with rueful humor—like Woody Allen wading into Ingmar Bergman.
A simultaneously humorous and poignant memoir from filmmaker and Men’s Health columnist Millhone (Screenwriting/New York Univ. Film School).
The author and his wife Rose had had an awful year. His mother died from a heart attack, his father was diagnosed with prostate cancer and one of their sons nearly died from birth complications. Then came the sucker punch: “It’s after the worst is over that the fun really begins. Post-traumatic stress: the gift that keeps on taking.” The lingering emotional fallout severely hurt their marriage, as each retreated into their own dark worlds. Millhone found sanctuary in an “impeccable” 1994 BMW 740i, which he purchased on eBay and had to drive from Texas to his home in New York City. The author asked his father to accompany him, a dicey proposition since growing up with him had been far from easy. “My mother couldn’t deal with the world, and my father couldn’t deal with my mother,” he writes, “and so he just went to the office and Mom just went nuts.” As the travelers journeyed home, Millhone’s memories poured out, each curve in the road eliciting a recollection of another terrible piece that made up the “year from hell.” But Millhone is a hopeless romantic, holding on tight to hope and to his love’s first flash, “one impossibly hopeful, sun-dappled, forever-now instant of time that we thought would never end.”
An impressive display of misery tinged with rueful humor—like Woody Allen wading into Ingmar Bergman.Pub Date: July 7, 2009
ISBN: 978-1-59486-823-8
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Rodale
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2009
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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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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