Uniquely memorable and poignantly surreal.
A film producer and screenwriter’s account of how he survived both stage-four brain cancer and surgery that rendered him unable to read.
When Sclavi began to experience severe headaches in 2010, he wrote them off as stress-related. He had been working on a mainstream Hollywood film and was determined to “put in it all the best stuff I had.” Then he collapsed and was told by doctors that he had glioblastoma, an especially aggressive form of brain cancer. Rather than focus completely on his inevitable struggles and losses—an operation that took out nearly an entire side of his brain; a happy marriage that collapsed under the emotional and financial strains caused by his illness—the author manages to tell a tragicomic tale steeped in playful anarchy. Part of how he achieves this is in the narrative organization. Sclavi interweaves the narrative of his post-diagnosis life with humorous stories—such as the time he first began working with the hilariously mercurial Russell Brand (who contributes the foreword) and the time he fell hopelessly in love with the mysterious Macedonian girl who later became his wife—from his happy pre-diagnosis life. When he refers to the cancer, he often calls it “the Aliens.” One place he went to battle them was the National Institutes of Health in Washington, D.C., where he took frequent trips in a “Spaceship.” There, he not only received radiation treatments, but also sessions from a cheery hypnotherapist who “really was Ned Flanders” from The Simpsons. Most remarkable of all is how Sclavi was able to write his story. Typing words into strings he could not read, he slowly put together his book manuscript with the help of Alex, a computerized voice that repeated each word back to him. By turns bizarre and beautiful, the narrative takes readers on a singular journey through illness, survival, and healing.
Uniquely memorable and poignantly surreal.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4736-4971-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Hachette UK
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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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