Another revitalizing breath to sustain the Red House in its long odyssey.
Poet Messer spins the life story of her childhood home in a handsome voice often eerily lost in reflection.
Nonetheless, this is a document of history, and this is a house with a long one, starting in 1647 when Walter Hatch made a small purchase of land in Marshfield, Massachusetts, and built a structure with wattle-and-daub chimney, thatched roof, and oiled-paper windows. Members of the Hatch family lived there for nearly 300 years, enduring many winters during which they “stood scorched-faced before the fire, while the rest of the room to their backs filled with frost.” In 1965, the author’s father bought the Red House, and she grew up there. Messer (Poetry and Creative Nonfiction/Univ. of North Carolina, Wilmington) elaborates the calendar of her days in and with the house, layered like a parfait between chronicles of the earlier inhabitants, who had left a rich paper legacy. Messer’s recollections sometimes feel as hoary as those of the Hatches: she speaks of her father tying tinfoil bows on the fruit trees to scare away hungry birds, so that “the whole yard shook with the soft tinkling of the bows and spots of light”; and when she spied on her sister playing the piano, “I would lie down and peer through the cracks in the floorboards where I could see her hands moving over the keys, feeling only the thin space, the board, between me and the room below.” Even the aftermath of a terrifying fire that decimated the building in 1971 is described with a poet’s lyricism: “Entering a burned house was like entering a dream mind—some elements were missing entirely or moved to other locations, the rooms the same but clouded, slightly off.” In a good way, much like Messer’s prose.
Another revitalizing breath to sustain the Red House in its long odyssey.Pub Date: June 21, 2004
ISBN: 0-670-03315-4
Page Count: 386
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2004
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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