Funny Roy Blount Jr. (Camels Are Easy, Comedy’s Hard, 1991; First Hubby, 1990; etc.), now 55 and a bachelor grandfather, reckons it’s time to take stock of his life. The inventory he produces, no surprise, is nicely written. More than that, it’s The Inside Skinny on Roy and his coming to terms with what he perceives as a curse. It has to do with his family, inevitably, and his ambivalent, close connection to his mother in particular, who regularly adjured her son to “be sweet.” Roy Senior was a solid citizen, a rock of Decatur, Ga. Mama was a lady burdened with a sad childhood. Young Roy’s birth, she made him know, nearly killed her and laid on him the biggest maternal guilt trip in the gentile world. Actually, though his parents may not have been extraordinary in life, Blount makes them so in memory, with writerly filial recollection. His memory, reliable or not, is powerful. “I remember discovering my feet,” he says and follows the assertion with some nice pages. In his search for a defining moment and what it was that turned him comical, Blount unloads a lot about many things, including a little etymology, a visit to China, baseball and sports writing, his marriages, children, and friends, and, bravely, women in general. There’s a nice essay on being funny and an exegesis on the state of juniorhood. True, he may maunder some and wax a tad prolix, but it’s surely a flow of entertaining words. The Latin motto on his stationery, he warns us, is “Si legetis, scribam. If you’ll read it, I’ll write it.” Perhaps not since Sophocles was working has there been such angst about Mama, but Blount’s autobiography is fashioned by a talented writer at the top of his game; and it is real sweet, too.
Pub Date: June 5, 1998
ISBN: 0-679-40054-0
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 1998
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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