Too bad the author failed to include an epilogue about his present-day successes (he’s a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and...
Poignant, heartfelt memoir of a gay Latino immigrant’s coming-of-age, played out against a relentless backdrop of abuse and neglect.
Poet, novelist and children’s author González (So Often the Pitcher Goes to Water Until It Breaks, 1999, etc.) digs deep to reveal a tortured childhood as the son of poverty-stricken, functionally illiterate Mexican farmworkers. The memoir opens in 1990, when the author was barely 20 and in flight from an abusive relationship with an unnamed older lover. González trekked to Indio, Calif., to reunite with his distant father for a restless, uncomfortable, three-day bus ride into Mexico, where he was raised. The narrative then turns to González’s youth. His father was a selfish alcoholic, his mother sickly, his grandfather increasingly menacing. Scores of relatives also inhabited their half-finished house. The family was uprooted when González’s 31-year-old mother succumbed to heart disease; home became the crime-ridden “government-subsidized cinderblock apartment of the Fred Young Farm Labor Camp.” Her barely teenaged son had furtive sex with older men he met in the grape fields where he worked during his summer vacations. First-love and weight issues soon complicated his life even further. The author delineates his youthful self as strong and resilient, focusing on his aspirations to become a school teacher in spite of a father who was “too busy” to come to his high-school graduation and who tried to dissuade González from taking advantage of a scholarship to attend college in Riverside, Calif. After describing his uneasy arrival at Riverside, the narrative returns to 1990: Oblivious father and resentful son separated soon after their arrival in Michoacán; suffocated by all the painful memories, González reluctantly returned to his abusive lover for a final round of broken bones and bruises.
Too bad the author failed to include an epilogue about his present-day successes (he’s a Guggenheim Fellowship recipient and an associate professor of English at the Univ. of Illinois)—it could have transformed this cheerless tale into something inspirational.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-299-21900-3
Page Count: 210
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2006
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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