Sweet as pie.
The Fab Four become the common ground a father and young son need to light a fire under their relationship in this winning memoir from journalist/novelist Smith (A Good Family, 1996, etc.).
Dad was overworked and underattentive to his seven-year-old: “As Sam got older, I seemed to be mummifying before his eyes . . . my posture defensive, my voice thinner and higher than usual.” One day when Sam was mooning around the house, Peter figured it was time for a new obsession and, not unaware of the inroads popular music was making into the boy’s life, thought the Beatles might make a suitable fixation. And how: from the first taste of Abbey Road, Sam was a goner. And why not? Peter rightly asks. “Nearly a half-century has defanged the group, reducing its innovations and iconoclasms to something warmer and fuzzier,” though the author found upon extensive re-listening that the lads still had their edge of wit and exoticism, still possessed their ability to be smart-assed without being boors. The band’s “boyhood friendships and grownup squabbles, its rivalries, love affairs, submarines, octopuses, silver hammers, newspaper taxis, piggies, raccoons, meter maids” were also pluses. Having grown up with the Beatles, Peter loved them every bit as much as Sam, and it is a small pleasure to watch as the two Smiths discover a vehicle of mutual transit to places they surely never expected to visit just weeks earlier: the politics of Vietnam, death and grief, privacy, Eastern religion, drugs. This occasionally seems overedited, with the author smoothing what had to have been some pregnant moments, but that small fault pales before the joy he conveys at the heaven-sent gift of togetherness he and Sam got from a pop group. You’ve got to love the Beatles, if only for having this kind of impact on the common man and boy, and Smith, whose motives in letting four other men loose in his son’s heart were pure.
Sweet as pie.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2004
ISBN: 0-618-25145-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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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