by Matthew Batt ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 19, 2012
This Old House for the NPR set.
A doctoral candidate takes on a massive project of home renovation.
In explaining how he and his wife became determined to purchase a house while he was studying for his degree in writing at the University of Utah, rather than renting like most graduate students, Batt writes, “To buy a house—or at least to look in earnest for one—is to admit to yourself that you think you’re ready…It was time to grow up and settle down.” The author was propelled by a sense that adulthood had “coldcocked” them: “everyone but us was dying, getting divorced, or having a kid.” This in turn compelled Batt to recklessly purchase a Fisbo, a “for sale by owner” house with serious long-term maintenance issues—and a largely unexplored reputation as a one-time “crack house.” The author deferred to the earnest eccentricity of the owner (Batt’s character sketches are deft but briefly drawn), who assured him that the house was an undervalued bargain but left Batt the legacy of years of jury-rigged repairs. Much of the book follows Batt as he attempts to renovate the house on a low budget, haplessly doing much of the work himself, and also turning to bemused salt-of-the-earth Utah men for assistance in such tasks as building a cement kitchen counter. A major theme, unsurprisingly, is that of masculinity: Batt’s home-improvement misadventures allow consideration of how hard it is for young men today (particularly intellectual types) to measure up to absent fathers. The embodiment of this idea is Batt’s grandfather, a doctor turned cantankerous, lovelorn old man, whose deterioration provides the main element of the back story of the author’s complicated family life. In the conclusion, Batt discusses his selling of the house and moving on to an academic posting. The relatable author writes clearly, but the twin story engines of personal angst and home-repair strife don’t really mesh, resulting in a memoir that feels inessential and highly specific rather than potentially universal.
This Old House for the NPR set.Pub Date: June 19, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-547-63453-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2012
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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