Navel-gazing, then, but redeemed by the author’s rich power of memory and mellifluous voice: the telling’s the thing, not...
Veteran biographer Holroyd (Bernard Shaw, 1998, etc.) digs up some more material on his most recent subject: his own family.
In the author’s previous memoir, Basil Street Blues (2000), he applied his trademark high-toned literary approach to personal history. That book brought Holroyd unexpected popular acclaim, as well as a fair amount of communication from readers who offered up more information about some of the foggier regions of his family history. These chips and fragments gave the writer an opportunity to add detail to the broad picture he painted in his earlier work. Holroyd takes a necessarily scattershot approach to his material; after all, something as rough and unplanned as a human life, much less numerous lives bound together by bloodlines and circumstance, can’t be neatly organized. But it’s remarkable how much he learned from complete strangers about relatives as close as his father and as mysterious as his grandfather’s mistress. Almost more interesting, however, are the details that Holroyd lets lie along the road of his discoveries, such as his penchant for visiting prostitutes as a young man and his secret marriage to novelist Margaret Drabble. Holroyd occasionally overidentifies with his subjects, a common problem with biographers and an especially deadly one for a writer who seems already too fond of introspection and who is essentially researching himself. Still, there are times—especially when revisiting his long, loving, tumultuous relationship with writer Philippa Pullar—when the power of his narrative takes off on a raw tear that is nothing less than exhilarating.
Navel-gazing, then, but redeemed by the author’s rich power of memory and mellifluous voice: the telling’s the thing, not the story.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-393-05273-7
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2004
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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