A slim yet potent and intimately ruminative debut memoir on travel, maturity, and culture.
A writer and editor considers how the places he’s called home have ultimately defined him as an African-American man.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s American Lives series, McCrary writes of becoming aware of his black heritage early in life but also about the impression his skin color had on others in small-town Normal, Illinois, in the 1980s and '90s. Spending his childhood on the campus of Illinois State University, “a place engineered for surface-level equality,” where his parents met and began a family, the author was greatly influenced by the wisdom of James Baldwin. McCrary traverses some rich territory in his lifetime so far, delivering insightful essays on racial and identity issues, class assumptions, family pride, and his own sexuality. He admits to a youthful reluctance to embrace his black heritage and that this type of self-segregation still endures: “Outside of my family I’ve managed to remain close to no other black people,” he concedes, adding that it is not “a real excuse; more a reason spurred by my discomfort with the subtleties of race in my hometown.” This kind of refreshing honesty and frank self-examination permeates the pages of the memoir, in which McCrary also contemplates the inherent queerness that emerged during childhood but didn’t solidify due to “fear and convenience” until his college years. He was waiting, he writes, for “something more dramatic than schoolboy crushes to shake me into myself.” Spending his 20s in Chicago matured and freed him from the restraints of suburban life but not enough to allow him to come to true terms with his sexuality. Through self-admitted “muddy but invaluable” experiences, McCrary’s authentic identity and self-confidence eventually emerged after years of self-loathing behaviors. He reflects fondly on his time studying abroad in Prague, a city he courts an active obsession with, a “geographic flirtation” fortified by Czech history, heritage, food and drink, and cabaret adventures.
A slim yet potent and intimately ruminative debut memoir on travel, maturity, and culture.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4962-0786-9
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: July 1, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 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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