A romantic but uneven memoir of growing up Irish Catholic in the Bronx, N.Y., during the 1950s and ’60s. Revisiting his childhood, Pearson (English/Old Dominion Univ.; A Place That’s Known, 1994), born in 1950, offers a tour of his Bronx neighborhood, including the playgrounds, ball fields, candy stores, schools, and street corners that were his hangouts. He remembers the games of football, baseball, and stickball, as well as both the discipline and good will of the Catholic nuns and brothers who taught him, exemplifying a tough love that sometimes spilled over into sadism. He also introduces his family: a protective and loving mother, a father who (along with other fathers in the neighborhood) stopped in at the local bar every night and arrived home not only drunk, but belligerent and punitive. A long, poignant chapter, full of fantasy, explores the man his father might have been if not for WWII and missed opportunities. Here are reflections on the boys in the ‘hood and their culture, but the images are often blurred around the edges: an initial essay, for instance, describing an expedition to Manhattan to view a pornographic movie, has great potential for broad humor or at least irony yet is curiously flat. The boys move through McCarthyism, President Kennedy’s assassination, burgeoning sexuality, and, as they near 18, the threat of being drafted for Vietnam. Pearson escaped the draft and went on to a Catholic college, later meeting his wife and becoming a teacher and a writer. As a child, Pearson thought that, as much as he also wanted to escape, the Bronx was “as close to paradise as anyone could expect to come”; as an adult, he was disheartened by the poverty and decay he found on return visits. A limp coda, describing a current community-based rescue operation, tries to end the memoir on an upbeat note. A mix of history and memory that doesn—t quite capture either the dynamism or the distinctiveness of the Bronx.
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-8156-0561-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Syracuse Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2000
BOOK REVIEW
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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