Unruly, unapologetic, and sometimes arduous.
An Australian immigrant looks back over a colorful lifetime in this debut memoir.
Saffron was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1948; his Polish mother met his father, a British soldier, in Germany. After the war, they married and settled briefly in Scotland before relocating to the military town of Catterick Garrison in England, then on to Bielefeld, Germany. Saffron remembers his early childhood vividly, including an incident when he threw his mother’s cabbage rolls on the floor. As a boy, Saffron attended a seminary in Paris, and he delighted in quaffing red wine while flying to the French capital. Later, the family moved to Australia; the author would join the Royal Australian Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, which led to service in Vietnam. He later spent time in Johannesburg, where he worked as a “glorified bouncer.” Overall, this memoir reads like a series of boisterous, casually linked anecdotes: “I’m going to start at the beginning, of course. ’Makes sense, doesn’t it? I’ll finish at the end, if that’s OK with you.” This confrontational style is pervasive, and not without a glib charm. Saffron seems to know his limitations as a writer—“Anyway, that’s my lot. I’ve bored you enough,” he writes, long before the end—but he also seems to be aware that his tales have the power to captivate. The memoir ends with numerous photos and short treatises on such subjects as PTSD, philosophy, music, and literature. Regarding the latter, he notes that “if anybody gets a laugh or two out of this [book], then I would have succeeded.” This memoir will raise an occasional chuckle as it takes readers on far-flung adventures. However, a couple of thoroughly unpalatable moments are posited on Jewish stereotypes: While describing an employer, Mr. Levy, he writes: “I found out a bit later that he was a Jew and was very, very tight with his money and didn’t have a charitable bone in his fat body”; later, he tells of castigating a Polish train conductor for charging him an expensive “Jewish rate” of currency exchange.
Unruly, unapologetic, and sometimes arduous.Pub Date: March 27, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5434-0747-1
Page Count: 316
Publisher: XlibrisAU
Review Posted Online: Aug. 27, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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