In any case, there’s not much Broadway razzle-dazzle in these extremely decorous pages, but MacNeil’s seen enough to keep...
A quarter-century after Wordstruck (1989), MacNeil returns to the memoir form to limn the slow accrual of character definitions, highlighted by critical historical episodes, which marked him as a newsman and shaped his journey from Canadian birth to US citizenship.
In an always amiable voice, proper though candid, the author acknowledges his adopted country’s faults: crude and excessive, its citizens sometimes seem too much the masters of the universe, a preening bunch who scant the poor as they coddle the rich. Yet MacNeil affirms America’s better nature as a great engine of democracy and prosperity, the cockpit of social evolution, the largest home of tolerance, “a force for good in the world.” Growing up in Nova Scotia, influenced by his Anglophile mother, he wound up living on and off in England for much of his life. A burgeoning news career found him cast to-and-fro across the Atlantic, and he took to the “ethnic minestrone of America . . . a spicy, garlicky, herbal potpourri absent or discouraged in Canada’s white porcelain airs.” Yet it was his career that determined his line of sight as he witnessed the hot and cold wars, assassinations, racism, and corruption. Working for Reuters in London in 1956, MacNeil acquired “an early perspective on the Cold War . . . a little to one side and accustomed to skepticism of American behavior.” When he started the first American public-TV news program in 1975, he sought to dig deeper than the empty soundbite, taking a more studied pace and stressing “coherence and editorial discipline . . . with beat reporters heavily outnumbering producers.” MacNeil’s evolution as a reporter has a distinct, entertaining path, while his attempt to situate his search for a homeland amid his professional wanderings seems spurious. “Walking home one fine evening past Lincoln Center, I had the sudden realization: I am a New Yorker!” Point taken, but it’s a minor point.
In any case, there’s not much Broadway razzle-dazzle in these extremely decorous pages, but MacNeil’s seen enough to keep his reminiscences percolating.Pub Date: May 13, 2003
ISBN: 0-385-50781-X
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2003
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
