As startling and memorable as fiction and ripe for film adaptation.
A rare and beautiful love story between a British-American “sailor boy” and a cultured, older Japanese woman who had lived through the World War II years.
Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Brinkley-Rogers was not yet a U.S. citizen in 1959 when he was serving the beginning of a stint on the USS Shangri-La, anchored off the seaport of Yokosuka, Japan. He was 19 and a wannabe poet when he met the mysterious, incomparable Kaji Yukiko (not her real name) in a bar, the White Rose, catering to the Western service clientele. What ensued was an astonishing relationship during the spring and summer months of 1959. Yukiko, 31, was raised in Manchuria and fled with her family after the war to Japan, where, as a young woman, she became the mistress of some gangsters in Hiroshima and finally escaped to work as a hostess in the White Rose. Full of secrets and wounds, Yukiko was, above all, a very educated woman who seized on the young British-born poet as a like-minded refugee who needed guidance in the literary and cinematic history of her country. During these months of brief meetings and through her exquisite letters, she essentially molded the “sailor boy” into a man capable of sublime thoughts and deep love. Yukiko encouraged Brinkley-Rogers to go to college and become a great poet and writer—and he did, over a long, varied career, finally settling in Arizona in retirement, where he unearthed Yukiko’s letters in 2014 and plunged into a maelstrom of memories that spurred him to address this powerful, moving memoir to “You.” Encapsulated within are Yukiko’s surviving letters, which are suffused with her stunning personality, captured as well in the author’s re-created portrait and dialogue of a woman “knocked down” by life but capable of such passionate feeling that she knocked the boy off his feet.
As startling and memorable as fiction and ripe for film adaptation.Pub Date: Aug. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-5125-5
Page Count: 352
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2016
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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