A wounded and affecting memoir lurks beneath the surface here; pity if it stays buried.
Uneasy memoir/history lesson from a quirky comedian.
Fans of Poundstone’s wry, ironic observational humor were shocked by allegations made in 2001 that the standup comedian had endangered and sexually abused her three adopted children (the charges were later dropped). The specter of that scandal hangs over this collection of ostensibly whimsical essays on the accomplishments of historical figures as contrasted with the quotidian struggles of the author. Poundstone is legally enjoined from discussing the particulars of the case, but her many references to the pain and humiliation she suffered in its wake are charged with a profound anger and emotional rawness that make for an awkward mix with the determinedly breezy tone of the prose. Her descriptions of the bureaucratic nightmare of court dates and mandated therapy sessions, and of her love for her adopted children (some of whom have severe physical and emotional problems) are in fact the most compelling aspects of the book, to the point that the historical material becomes an unwelcome distraction. It’s as if she set out to write a lighthearted monologue with an amusing conceit (Beethoven composed great symphonies despite being deaf, while Poundstone can’t get her daughter to practice piano; rinse, lather, repeat), but her personal trauma keeps bubbling to the surface. This tension has turned a slight and forgettable book into an interesting, if uncomfortable and unsatisfying, one. Poundstone is never less than clever and likable, even as a decidedly odd self-portrait slowly emerges: She portrays herself, with endearingly reflexive self-deprecation, as an alcoholic, completely disengaged from sex, maniacally compulsive about housework, anxious about money and something of an alienated, morbidly private underachiever. It’s this character, rather than Sitting Bull or Joan of Arc, that here commands the reader’s sympathy and interest. A narrative dealing head-on with her legal problems and embattled family would have made for a gripping reading experience indeed.
A wounded and affecting memoir lurks beneath the surface here; pity if it stays buried.Pub Date: Nov. 7, 2006
ISBN: 0-609-60316-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Harmony
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2006
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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