by Roddy Doyle ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 11, 2002
A sweet, inoffensive, rambling oral history of a writer’s respectable, hardworking, warmly dignified parents. Marriage never...
The Booker Prize–winner and the Irish working-class’s Marcel Proust (A Star Called Henry, 1999, etc.) offers a nonfiction account of his parents’ reminiscences “about the people they were before they were my parents,” continuing through WWII and into their senior years.
And what a book it might have been. But fans will search in vain through this rambling collection of anecdotal recollections for Doyle’s hilariously unsentimental portraits of street-corner romantics, dizzy dreamers, and righteous fools. Instead of crafting a dual biography using his novelist’s talent for wry observation and revealing detail, Doyle lets his parents talk—and talk and talk—about themselves in long, discursive passages unrelieved by description or analysis, supplemented by black-and-white photos and occasional annotations. Granted, Roderick “Rory” Doyle, a newspaper compositor and later a teacher of the printer’s trade, and Ita Bolger, secretary in a medical school’s pathology department, have their son’s gift for a good story. Their memories of early hardships, childhood chums, dark houses overflowing with relatives, the purchases they made with the savings from their first jobs (a briar pipe, lavender soap), and their courtship (he was a little drunk during their first dance; she grew to admire him as they took long walks around Dublin) are likable and sympathetic, and there will be no dry eyes after reading that Ita mourns her son Anthony (who died the day after he was born) by refusing ever again to pray to the saint she named him for. Though Doyle says, in a preface, that he left out many of the stories about him and his siblings, what’s missing from this family album are the deeper glimpses into character that might be found in those less comforting, ignoble incidents that a loving son may not have wanted to put into print.
A sweet, inoffensive, rambling oral history of a writer’s respectable, hardworking, warmly dignified parents. Marriage never sounded quite so good.Pub Date: Nov. 11, 2002
ISBN: 0-670-03204-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2002
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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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