Originally published in 1911 as an anonymous autobiography, this novel by radical journalist Vorse (18741937) paints a convincing portrait of the pleasures, regrets, and grievances of a middle-class grandmother who fights daily to be her own person. Vorse was 37 when she penned the book ``in her mother's voice,'' creating a long-widowed narrator who has passed that ``golden moment'' in life when her children regarded her as their comrade and now finds herself treated much like a young child. She's subject to the gentle, caring tyrannies of her nearest and dearest, who take for granted their right to determine which activities are good for her (going for unwanted walks and for even more unwanted rides in the newfangled ``nasty, smelly, jouncing, child-grazing, dog-smashing, chicken-routing'' automobile) and which activities aren't good for her (light dusting or cleaning out the attic—although she would like to do both). We sense the narrator's shrewdness when, after a young visitor complains that ``there are no more real grandmothers,'' she exposes the selfishness underlying this ideal. And we appreciate her spirit when she says, ``I shall keep my family alert over my misdeeds until my end.'' Vorse, however, resists idealizing this grandmother—in fact, a discussion of the narrator's own mother depicts a woman who did a better job than she herself did of keeping her independence and managing her later years. Still, Vorse's narrator is wise enough to prompt Doris Grumbach, in the book's afterword, to hope that middle-aged readers can learn from the ``autobiography'' what it's like to be elderly and that the elderly can find company in it. A meandering yet purposeful work that reads, for good and bad, like the long monologue of an elderly, articulate relative. Untarnished by the years on its major points.
Pub Date: April 15, 1995
ISBN: 0-916366-79-0
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Pushcart
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1995
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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