Frantic and meandering in its delivery, but nonetheless a searing portrait of a family hobbled by chronic mental illness.
Poet, novelist, jazz promoter and psychotherapist Pines (Redemption, 1997, etc.) harrowingly depicts the incremental psychological breakdown of his younger brother.
Born two years apart, the boys were viewed very differently by their mother, a lawyer who preferred to concentrate on her career. “One child was workable,” their father Ben explained. “Claude was a surprise. I slipped that one in.” The author remembers looking into his baby brother’s crib and thinking, “I will never be lonely again.” Neither boy complained about tagging along while Ben performed his rounds as chief surgeon at the Brooklyn Jewish Hospital. After their parents’ discord escalated into a nasty divorce and Ben married a much younger woman, the brothers cowered together in solidarity and disillusionment. Though circumstances often separated them—Paul went to boarding school and following a short stint in college hit the West Coast; Claude studied abroad and briefly attended medical school in the Bronx—the brothers’ bond remained strong. But as the years progressed, they found themselves apart without communication for long periods of time. The memoir frenetically flashes between the brothers’ early days and the mid-1980s, when middle-aged Paul became reluctant to leave the increasingly agitated Claude alone while he traveled to supervise a European film adaptation of his novel. After witnessing his brother’s anxious, disheveled condition at his wedding in 1985, the author insisted that Claude be evaluated. He was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, and the brothers’ sad, deep, codependent relationship suffered even more in the heartbreaking years to come as Claude’s psychosis was eventually accompanied by heart disease, depression and other ills. The author’s deep love for his sibling is evident on every page of this intense, painstaking chronicle.
Frantic and meandering in its delivery, but nonetheless a searing portrait of a family hobbled by chronic mental illness.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-931896-34-4
Page Count: 318
Publisher: Curbstone Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2007
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
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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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