A verdant memory of a different American childhood and of an idyll that ended tragically.
An earnest memoirist remembers her family and their hardscrabble organic-farm life in Maine
During the enthusiasm of the 1960s, Coleman’s parents chose to live as self-sufficient a life as possible, becoming evangelists of healthy, all-natural living. The family’s farm was coaxed into fecundity with the efforts of a number of virile acolytes, who, when they were not tending the vegetable stand, enjoyed the natural unclothed life. Coleman’s mother had babies, baked bread, did chores and kept a journal while her father supervised, spread manure and pronounced wise and generally trite aphorisms. Figuring largely in the tale were their neighbors and spiritual guides, Helen and Scott Nearing, the redoubtable counterculture back-to-the-landers. Learning from the Nearings, Coleman’s father taught others the correct, macrobiotic lifestyle. The family’s tenuous subsistence amid the roots and rocks was nourishing and rewarding, until the shocking drowning death of the author’s 3-year-old sister, a heartbreaking event that led to the slow disintegration of the family. In this elegiac memory piece, the author describes her bucolic girlhood in languid, deliberately measured prose, and investigates the downward spiral that followed her sister’s death.
A verdant memory of a different American childhood and of an idyll that ended tragically.Pub Date: April 12, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-06-195832-8
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2011
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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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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