Despite some gratuitous name-dropping, a warm account full of laughs and love.
Actor Tucker’s follow-up memoir to Living in a Foreign Language: A Memoir of Food, Wine, and Love in Italy (2007).
Best known for his role on L.A. Law, Tucker takes enormous pleasure in food, wine and friends, especially when all are to be found in Italy, where he and his wife, actress Jill Eikenberry, have a house in Umbria. The gregarious author enthusiastically writes about his enjoyment of all things Italian, especially mouthwatering meals. But when Jill’s mother, Lora, was widowed, a darker world began to intrude on their sunny semi-retirement. When Lora’s subsequent decline into dementia made independent living in Santa Barbara, Calif., impossible for her, they moved the elderly widow to a senior residence near the Manhattan apartment where the couple lived during part of the year. That arrangement proved unsatisfactory as well, and eventually she moved into an apartment across the hall from them. Tucker makes clear his misgivings about this proximity, and he ably captures his wife’s complicated feelings of guilt, responsibility and love. When his daughter Alison, an accomplished caterer, moved to Manhattan and took an apartment nearby and their son Max, a musician, moved in with her, Tucker realized that their new arrangement resembled the close, multigenerational family life so common in Italian society. The benefits were huge, with everyone supporting each other, and Alison brought the added bonus of terrific food. Tucker and his wife were able to move ahead with a film they had been producing and appear in an off-off-Broadway musical. The author—whose sturdy ego is evident, as are his concerns about his privacy—presents himself more as a sympathetic observer than as a deeply involved participant in the mother-in-law project.
Despite some gratuitous name-dropping, a warm account full of laughs and love.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8021-1921-6
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2009
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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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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