A memoir to savor for its many riches and, most of all, its zest.
Humorous and insightful chronicle of a long life filled with interesting friends and experiences, shared for nearly six decades with an exceptional man.
Still writing at 87 (the eponymous column for her local New Hampshire paper), Campion is one of those rare people who can recall both joyously and wisely a full existence, dwelling mostly in sunny uplands rather than the inevitable dark valleys. She is an accomplished raconteur; her stories of dinners with Craig Claiborne; a 1992 interview with Hillary Rodham Clinton (a fellow Wellesley graduate); and a conversation with E.B. White are exemplary, entertaining as well as informative. But these delightful anecdotes are only part of a book as notable for its personal testament as for its portrait of the early 20th century. In an address to her class of 1938 reunion—now a classic after its 1993 publication in The Boston Globe—Campion listed all the changes her generation had experienced. “We were before television, penicillin, nylon, Xerox,” she noted. “Wellesley ‘girls’ were forbidden to wear pants and Harvard ‘boys’ thought only Hillbillies wore blue jeans . . . we had real fountain pens with real bottles of ink . . . and when Ray Noble slowly sang ‘The Very Thought of You’ we melted.” Born in 1917 in Hawaii, where her military father was stationed, she numbered among her experiences as an army brat a voyage to Manila on the same boat as the honeymooning General MacArthur and a stint in Panama. In her last year at Wellesley, she met husband-to-be Tom Campion, a Harvard senior who taught her “that laughter is life’s best solvent.” This lesson helped as Tom changed jobs four times, they raised five children (one of whom had a breakdown in college), and she wrote seven books, including one that became the movie The Long Gray Line.
A memoir to savor for its many riches and, most of all, its zest.Pub Date: Oct. 29, 2004
ISBN: 1-58465-407-4
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 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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