A biography with narrative muscle and thrilling historical relevance.
O’Faolain, mistress of the memoir (Almost There, 2003, etc.), meets her match in fellow Irishwoman Chicago May, feisty turn-of-the-century feminist and queen of crooks.
O’Faolain’s biography of May Duignan, who fled County Longford, Ireland, for New York in 1890, is as much about the author, her beleaguered Irish clan and the tribulations of Irish emigration as it is about her notorious subject. O’Faolain manages to weave the destiny of an entire people into the flight of auburn-haired, buxom 19-year-old May, from her impoverished home in Edenmore, as her mother was delivering yet another baby the family could ill afford to raise. May fled with the family’s savings; the fugitive booked cabin class to New York, rather than steerage, in the first of her devil-may-care acts that would come to characterize her in the new world. From Nebraska, where she supposedly had an uncle, to cities teeming with vice such as Chicago and New York, as well as cities overseas, she capitalized on her good looks by learning quickly how to make a sucker of an admirer, and soon excelled as a “badger” in luring men into rooms where they would be fleeced. Flush from her prostitution earnings, ruthless May—“the tart who could bite diamonds out of tie-pins”—fell in with safe-cracker Eddie Guerin, and their American Express heist in Paris proved her eventual downfall. O’Faolain quotes extensively from May’s end-of-life, picaresque 1928 autobiography, Chicago May, Her Story, which the author found in the New York Public Library. Employing her own autobiographical skills and intimacy with Irish sob stories (see Are You Somebody?, 1998), O’Faolain speculates endlessly on May’s motivation and intention, tracking years of brutal incarceration, fly-by-night grifting and illness, ending in May’s heartbreaking “disillusion with the act of autobiography itself.”
A biography with narrative muscle and thrilling historical relevance.Pub Date: Sept. 22, 2005
ISBN: 1-57322-320-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
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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