An earnest but disorganized remembrance.
A plainspoken memoir by an American ex-soldier, meteorologist, father, and recovering addict who overcomes challenges and gains insights while on a quest to find inner peace.
In his debut, Washington works to weave his varied experiences into a statement of his personal philosophy, which is made clear in the first line: “I believe the foundation of peace is having a positive outlook on life.” The rest of this short but comprehensive work explores Washington’s efforts to practice this positivity throughout the ups and downs of his life, from childhood to the present. His military service, his career in meteorology, his Christian faith, and his times spent in New York City and St. Louis all play important parts in the story. But these all pale in comparison to the two most engaging segments: an account of Washington’s relationship with his son, and another about his struggle with crack cocaine. The former is an emotional story of the author’s growth from a boy, who becomes a father at 17, to a man, who’s been made wise by tragedy. The latter is a strong, if more conventionally told, addiction memoir that brims with honesty; it also makes a narrative digression, briefly telling the author’s tale from his wife’s point of view, which comes as a welcome breath of fresh air. Readers may wish that Washington had explored these portions of his life in greater depth and cut back on many of the others. Doing so might have helped to correct the book’s most frustrating flaw: a confusing structure that proceeds according to theme—such as “childhood,” “faith,” and “the Navy”—with little regard to when individual events happened, which causes the reader’s sense of time to blur. The chapter about Washington’s son, for example, comes relatively early in the memoir, but it covers a 20-year span that the author repeatedly re-examines over the course of the rest of the book. Even within chapters, the narration leaps around in a way that it makes it difficult to place events in order. In its best moments, however, Washington offers a compelling read about his darkest struggles.
An earnest but disorganized remembrance.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5320-0675-3
Page Count: 162
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2017
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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