A diary of devastation too good not to share.
A heartfelt and hyperliterate take on love as a mixtape.
Coviello (English/Univ. of Illinois, Chicago; Tomorrow's Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America, 2013, etc.) tells the story of recovering from his life's greatest loss to date: the breakup of his marriage and family. A sheltered young English professor, the author met and married an older woman with children. Her affair with a co-worker a few years later shattered his world and left him in the precarious, nonlegal role of ex-stepfather to her two daughters. Coviello recounts memories in the present tense, and the 18 songs of the title prove closer to 30, with each chapter evoking a few pop songs that trigger memories surrounding the dissolution of his marriage. His sincerity is by turns insufferable and irresistible, but he is a true believer in the power of love and in the magic of certain pop songs to encapsulate, transform, infect, and heal. His personal compilation mixes tunes that remind him of his bewitchingly broken ex-wife, Evany, with songs that evoke his feelings as a suburban man learning to love and be loved by other people, plus a few tracks for the loyal friends who picked him up each time he collapsed in grief. With its convoluted syntax and attenuated musings about love and the inner life, Coviello’s style imitates his heroes Henry James and George Eliot, and reading his book feels a bit like finding a cache of letters from one close friend to another, with the writer casually unraveling on the page. Summing up one’s life in a list of carefully chosen tracks has developed into something of a microgenre, with pop songs serving as the madeleines for the last pre-digital generation. While some other High Fidelity–inspired memoirs undoubtedly “do” the music better, few outpace the grim vivacity of Coviello’s writing or match the depth of feeling he summons from the soundtrack of his own neuroses.
A diary of devastation too good not to share.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-14-313233-2
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Penguin
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2018
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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