Affecting, heavy and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny account of growing up with a crazy father.
Stage and TV actor Birkenhead, a Salon.com and Marie Claire contributor, revisits his highly unusual childhood.
The eldest of four, the author grew up in suburban Long Island, where the center of his universe was his capricious, vitriolic father. The book’s title is a nod to Gonville Bromhead, a real-life mid-19th-century British lieutenant portrayed by Michael Caine in Zulu (1964). Gonville was a favorite of Dad, who was known to dress up—in a helmet and red underwear—and impersonate Gonville. An anglophile, nudist and avid gun collector, Birkenhead’s father married his mother when she was 19 and he was 24. From the outside he maintained the appearance of normalcy, working as an economics professor at Brooklyn College. The private dynamics, however, dictated by his erratic mood swings, led to his tormenting of the family, with violence and threats, and nine miserable months living in Sussex, England. Birkenhead’s mother bore the worst of his abuse, including a broken nose and a brush with marital rape after their separation, but she pioneered a successful career writing musicals. The author chronicles his swirling confusion through adolescence as he came to grips with his father’s madness, and darkest, most intriguing part of his memoir centers on his own inner demons. After punching a high-school girlfriend in the face and, years later, kicking in the door of another lover, he was forced to confront the behaviors and instincts inherited from his father. The book originated as a one-man show, and it still possesses a conversational quality, reading like a tempered monologue peppered with explosive crescendos. Birkenhead is less interested in language than pure storytelling, and he pulls no punches in depicting his once-idolized father as a deeply flawed wreck of a man.
Affecting, heavy and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny account of growing up with a crazy father.Pub Date: March 2, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9883-1
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Free Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2009
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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