Finding his uncle, one of E.M. Forster's lower-class lovers, and other friends of the family relegated to footnotes in one of the novelist's biographies, Belshaw was driven to write this overextended, semifictionalized memoir of that circle of friends and lovers. To counteract what he feels is reticence on this score by Forster biographers, Belshaw presents a half-documented, half-guessed account of the intimate life of his four ``uncles'': the maternal Charles, his real uncle; Jack Sprott (a professor of sociology known around Bloomsbury as Sebastian); working-class Ted Shread; and Morgan Forster. Sprott became friends with Forster at Cambridge, remaining a lifelong confidant (and finally Forster's literary executor), and met Charles Lovett (and later his boyfriend Ted) in Nottingham while there as a lecturer; Sprott introduced Charles to Forster, who took up with himthus connecting everyone to the young Belshaw. Unfortunately for Forster and this small, enduring network of what he once called his ``beloved and uneminent friends,'' Belshaw chooses to present his material in the form of first-person monologues by his four ``uncles,'' interspersed with his own memories and an account of writing this book. The uncles' sections are unconvincing performances of literary ventriloquism interladen with scrapbook helpings of letters, diary entries, and speculative reminiscences. Belshaw's own tediously self-involved narrative of his initial discovery about his uncle Charles's true part in Forster's life, his archival research, and feuding with Forster biographers counterbalances an unbearably coy series of fantasy dialogues between his characters in the afterlife in which they gossip, bicker, and debate ad nauseam such issues as class distinctions and the treatment of homosexuals in England. Belshaw's pretentious and pedantic account never transcends posthumous gossip about some nobodies who knew a somebody. (4 pages of b&w photos & illustrations)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-233-98874-2
Page Count: 239
Publisher: Andre Deutsch/Trafalgar
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1995
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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