Warm and vivid, bursting with life and energy, this is a valentine—but a clear-eyed one—to a particular place and time.
Marvelously appealing memoir charts an enchanted few years of boyhood in post-war Hong Kong.
Escaping from dreary old 1952 England on a boat bound for Hong Kong, Booth's mother whispered to him “Aren't we the lucky ones?” And they were—their next few years on the island would be marked by such color and life as they'd never seen back in Blighty. Happy chance that Martin's father, an Admiralty civil servant, had been posted there; happier chance that he had a job that kept him out of the house all day, sparing his vivacious, fun-loving wife and intrepid son of his gloomy presence. Booth shares vivid scenes from 50 years ago, of a Hong Kong still slightly sleepy after the war, a place where a boy could wander the teeming streets unaccompanied for countless hours, and run across a cobra or a porcupine in the more rural pockets. Young Martin threw himself into the local culture, going fearlessly as far as his legs would take him—to local markets, mountainsides and even the lawless quarter run by the local mafia, where Booth was taken under the wing of a young thug who revealed their opium dens, brothels and secret meeting rooms, and then made clear what would happen to the boy if he ever told of what he'd seen. Through conversation and friendship with other friendly locals, young Booth also learns about the war, the conflict between the Japanese and the Chinese, the tactics of the communists and the fate of the hustling refugees who filled the Hong Kong streets. The author also learns what kind of a man his father is (not a very nice one), and what a woman of quality his mother is, exploring their relationship from the eyes of the child he was, interpreting it with the knowledge he has now.
Warm and vivid, bursting with life and energy, this is a valentine—but a clear-eyed one—to a particular place and time.Pub Date: Dec. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-34817-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2005
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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