Subjective memoir about film reviewer Haskell's emotions when her Film reviewer husband Andrew Sarris is felled by a near-fatal rare disease and becomes the sickest person ever seen in New York Hospital who lived. Many will admire Haskell's knack for wringing every emotive droplet from a vast thunderhead. One gives up early to her endless diversions or else finds oneself locked into an excruciating reading experience of walleyed pages that seem like nothing so much as reportorial space-filling Never mind that all the stuffing—the whole emotional webbing of her life, of her parental ties, her ties to her husband's family, her personal friendships (nobody seems left out), workplace friends, friends in the hospital—proves magnetized to her "love" theme. One cries GET ON WITH IT! But no—it's surrender to what she herself terms "neurotic" and sounds like free association, much of it in the jargon of a lapsed 70's feminist. In the end she admits that she's leaving Andy's version of his illness to himself—it's his material. And she is accustomed not only to living in her adored husband's shadow, but also in having his fabulous film-brain and knockout intuitive powers at her disposal. But here she's on her own, and recapturing square-handed signals of despair. Andy's illness is undiagnosable. Operation follows operation. A colostomy, ugh! Infections create big new illnesses. He's dying He's paranoid—for months! She can't connect with him. What's worse, her mother, who has never connected with Andy, can't connect with her. And Andy's mother is a mess, seemingly taking on his illness and suddenly coming down with something like Alzheimer's disease. The bills are colossal. For the first time in her childless marriage, Molly attempts to sort out the household finances and is staggered. Close friends die by the handful. And WHAT'S WRONG WITH ANDY? He's such a multilayered mystery, with so many bugs and breakdowns, that by the time he miraculously recovers the final diagnosis is Kafkaesque makeshift. Many strong clinical passages will carry this with most readers, who may well warm to the love theme too and find Haskell's method daring.
Pub Date: April 19, 1990
ISBN: 0595140408
Page Count: 306
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 17, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 1990
BOOK REVIEW
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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