Tonic for malcontents: goes down easily and leaves a lingering, pleasantly sweet and sour aftertaste.
Engaging memoirs of a search for life with meaning that has taken the author from young wife and mother to hippie peacenik and feminist counselor to writer and environmental activist.
Sojourner (Delicate, 2001), a contributor to NPR’s Morning Edition, begins with her Catholic childhood in upstate New York. Unsettled by a brilliant, neurotic mother and weak, frightened father, she found her security in reading stories. The following decades brought early marriage and motherhood, a succession of lovers, life in an “urban, anarchist, agrarian commune,” and deep unrest and unhappiness. With rent, food, and childcare covered by various Great Society programs, she returned to college to study sociology, had her consciousness raised by a women’s-studies class, and within a few years was teaching feminist courses and getting even with all the wrongdoing men in her life. In middle age she discovered the work of Edward Abbey, particularly The Monkey Wrench Gang and Desert Solitaire, and moved to Flagstaff, Arizona, where she now lives alone (her children are grown and on their own) in a small cabin with electricity but no running water. In graceful, brief essays, Sojourner writes about finding her life’s true work and her spiritual home, about slowing down the pace of a too-fast life, connecting with a place, and making friendships with other people who care for that place. Keeping her memoirs from sliding into a smugness are revelations about the author’s devotion to casinos and slot machines, her addiction to her computer’s Scrabble game and e-mail, her troubles with drinking, and her disappointments with men. A portrait emerges of a strong, mature woman, thoughtful, witty, candid, and, if not exactly serene, then content with and even proud of the life she has made for herself and the work she is doing to preserve the beauty of the land around her.
Tonic for malcontents: goes down easily and leaves a lingering, pleasantly sweet and sour aftertaste.Pub Date: March 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-7432-2968-1
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2004
BOOK REVIEW
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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