If the rest of this book had the panache of its closing pages, Rowan might almost have atoned for his years of deceit.
An affectedly “literary” confession and apology from a notorious plagiarizer.
As Q.R. Markham, Rowan made a splash in the fall of 2011 with the publication of his spy novel Assassin of Secrets, the first of a proposed series. He made a bigger splash when the publisher withdrew the book after its first weekend of sales upon finding it had been constructed almost entirely of bits and pieces from a dozen or more already published spy novels by the likes of John Gardner and Robert Ludlum, to name only the best known. Rowan was instantly pilloried, particularly on the Internet, where he was showered with poisonous barbs and death threats. Online sleuths quickly uncovered more plagiarism in his past, including a short story partly lifted from Graham Greene that appeared under Rowan’s name in Partisan Review in 2002. Why did he do it? Unsurprisingly, Rowan blames an overwhelming desire for fame, fortune and the respect of friends and family combined with lack of confidence in his own abilities to acquire all the above. “I did at one point have a voice,” Rowan laments, suggesting that his thievery was a way to borrow others’ voices when his went missing. Trying to retrieve it here, he often sounds like a self-conscious imitation of David Foster Wallace, with dashes of Kurt Vonnegut, Martin Amis and James Joyce thrown in willy-nilly. A former girlfriend summed up nicely the problem with Rowan’s style, calling it “show-offy and geared to impress by overwhelming the reader.” She suggested he aim for “writing that tries to communicate rather than obscure.” The author finally pulls that off in the final chapter, a straightforward account of the unfolding of the Assassin affair that, like the best crime writing, is almost unbearably suspenseful.
If the rest of this book had the panache of its closing pages, Rowan might almost have atoned for his years of deceit.Pub Date: Oct. 16, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-891241-58-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: YETI/Verse Chorus
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2012
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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