Remarkable characters and rich historical details make this an illuminating portrait of a titanic man and a vanishing rural...
Based on childhood reminiscences, this debut memoir about a boy’s adventures in backwoods North Carolina as the son of a wealthy bootlegger in the 1960s and ’70s transcends mere tribute.
Opening with his father’s rise from rural poverty to near-feudal wealth as a moonshine bootlegger during Prohibition (and his subsequent control of thousands of acres near Clayton, N.C.), Sullivan’s memoir is as much a portrait of the rural, post-Reconstruction South as it’s a portrayal of the infamous bootleg king Percy Flowers or a boy’s awakening to an adult world. Rich in cultural and historical detail—e.g., Flowers was called “the most notorious moonshiner in all of the United States” by the Saturday Evening Post in 1958—Sullivan draws on recollection and research to vividly evoke his biological father and his own family life, including Curry, the author’s cuckolded father; Bea, his practical mother; and Reno, a canny, African-American bootlegger. These portraits are too cursory to rise to the level of great characters, but the details of time and place—the slaughter of hogs, the stoking of a whiskey still, the wood-fired curing using tobacco sticks—are often riveting. Sullivan has a keen eye for poignant irony—noting, for example, that Percy’s legitimate family line died out despite his lifelong devotion to perfecting the bloodlines of his hounds. Regrettably, clumsy structural devices undercut the book’s considerable strengths: The memoir is structured using a series of italicized letters by the author to his own two sons; the letters are intercut among roman chapters, and handwritten pull quotes from these letters are inserted like illustrations to highlight principle lessons he would have them learn (e.g., “With faith, you have a basis for belonging and a foundation for living”). These elements distract from the compelling story of Flowers’ rise and fall, as does frequent repetition of information.
Remarkable characters and rich historical details make this an illuminating portrait of a titanic man and a vanishing rural South.Pub Date: May 3, 2013
ISBN: 978-1482346671
Page Count: 330
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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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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