by Rhoda Bailey Warren ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 30, 1999
An affecting and well-written, if uneven, memoir of life in the holler. Warren locates her earliest memories in Depression-era Kentucky, where her father worked the coal mines and her mother struggled to raise 13 children. Warren evokes that world with a keen sense of detail: “Thick clouds of coal dust blown from [the] blasting inferno hung in the air picked up an air current and floated off to settle on every leaf of every tree and bush it could reach,” she writes of the setting. She is not always successful when she relates the details of her own life, for Warren seems strangely reluctant to place herself at center stage, and the distance is sometimes unsettling. When her gaze is elsewhere than on herself, however, Warren writes confidently and interestingly, telling tales of itinerant, guitar-strumming evangelists, scruffy dogs and their scruffy owners, and oddball neighbors. (One, a midwife, was held to be trustworthy because she could read and write, even though, Warren notes, “Father knew a man who carried spectacles around in his shirt pocket without knowing one word from another.”) Eventually driven from the Kentucky backwoods by poverty and encroaching mining and big-timber interests, her family relocated to Wyoming, where, Warren writes, people talked loudly (because, her mother explains, the wind blows all the time and they have to make themselves heard above it) and asked them rude questions about their background. Warren relates that she then endured years of shame about her hillbilly past before, married to a New Yorker, she decided to return home and embrace her past. The close of her memoir, however, is a particularly telling example of the adage that you can’t go home again. Readers of Harry Caudill’s Night Comes to the Cumberlands will find much of value in Warren’s life story.
Pub Date: Jan. 30, 1999
ISBN: 0-89733-464-7
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Academy Chicago
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1999
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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