Hard to say how heavily it’s embroidered, but this is a tale of salvation sufficient to make Oprah happy, if only she still...
A confessed felon tells of his redemption by faith, the love of a good woman—and needlepoint.
How outlaw, druggie, and convict Ray Materson went straight is a straightforward story told here in the first person (though wife Melanie is credited as co-author). Ray’s resumé progresses from busboy to cocaine cowboy. As a drug counselor, he learned where to cop the best dope. He attempted a stick-up with a shoplifted toy pistol, got quickly busted and quickly confessed. (It seemed like a good idea at the time.) In jail, the foiled stick-up artist planned a daring escape with a simulacrum of a gun. Again quickly busted, he was dealt a 25-year sentence. It didn’t take long before he experienced an epiphany in the slammer, where, by his accounting, he led a blameless life. When he discovered that he could embroider like Grandma using contrived equipment and unraveled socks, he became a prison star. Fellow inmates commissioned works in exchange for cigarettes (the universal prison currency). The creation of original art in his cage studio gained favor with his warders and the public. One particular fan became his promoter, his girlfriend, and eventually his wife. (Their prison honeymoon is discreetly described). Ray discusses daily life in the pen, but his central concern is incarcerated folk art, and his text is amply illustrated with small examples related to the narrative. In its way, this is a catalogue raisonné, with graphics of the kind Grandma Moses might have rendered had she been in the Big House. Readers may judge the art themselves, but it was interesting enough to attract a New York dealer—a dealer in art, not the stuff other dealers once offered the author, who was paroled and is now free.
Hard to say how heavily it’s embroidered, but this is a tale of salvation sufficient to make Oprah happy, if only she still had a book club. (Illustrations)Pub Date: Sept. 27, 2002
ISBN: 1-56512-340-9
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2002
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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