Inspiring and courageous.
In fulfilling the promise made in his third collection of poetry (My Index of Slightly Horrifying Knowledge, 2008, etc.), Guest produces a memoir chronicling the life-altering accident that robbed him of an active childhood.
When the author was 12, he lost control of a bicycle and flipped over the handlebars, breaking both arms and shattering two neck vertebrae. His hospital experience, related in surreal, fever-dream tones, became a harsh amalgam of “catastrophe and convalescence.” Guest was told he had only a slim chance of ever walking again and should resign himself to living indefinitely as a wheelchair-bound quadriplegic. Nausea, indigestion and infections mattered little compared to the full-body paralysis that sent him to a rehabilitation facility in Atlanta, where he was fitted into a fiberglass vest and a steel traction “halo” for nine weeks, an alternative therapy that proved ineffective. Befriending 17-year-old Josh and others boosted his self-esteem much more than the “libidinal hazing” of awkward sex-instruction videos that were showcased nightly within the facility. Eventually, nerves healed and partial sensation returned to his extremities, but not before an excruciating neck surgery. Finally returning home, he faced rides on the “short bus,” a string of eccentric assistants and the excitement and challenge of the female sex. Young adulthood was a mixed bag. The author was callously mugged in an elevator yet found true emotional release in crafting volumes of poetry, teaching and blissful physical intimacy. Never mawkish or grim, Guest’s lyrical narrative ability tempers the heft of his experience, but the tender age at which he endured this grueling ordeal resonates on every page.
Inspiring and courageous.Pub Date: May 4, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-168517-0
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Jan. 24, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2010
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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