A poignant memoir of growing up as the product of a racially mixed marriage in the 1950s by a national correspondent for U.S. News and World Report. Minerbrook's parents represented two very different cultures. His mother, LaVerne, was fleeing the suffocations of family and small-town life in the Missouri ``bootheel,'' a place of blinkered racial attitudes in the heart of the Cotton Belt. His father, Alan, was the product of Chicago's black elite, an upper-middle-class man with aspirations to professional life. After her marriage, LaVerne was dropped by her family, and at the outset of the book, the adult Minerbrook has gone to Missouri seeking to close this chapter in his growing up. Using this attempt to exorcise personal demons as a starting point, the author retraces the turbulent years of his parents' marriage, the forces in both families and in society that drove a wedge between them, and his own struggle with questions of racial and personal identity. He recounts amusingly his childhood days of running wild on New York City's Upper West Side in the '50s; he chronicles in harrowing detail his father's descent into drug and alcohol abuse and terrifying acts of violence. By and large, Minerbrook is writing to lay the ghosts to rest, and the book is finally an eloquent record of his voyage to maturity in the complex rivers of race, pride, and dignity. His final destination is a place of impressive equanimity, a place in which blame is supplanted by understanding and a sober acceptance of the humanity of his family at both its best and worst. (For another memoir by the son of a racially mixed marriage, see The Color of Water by James McBride, p. 1546.) Although floridly overwritten in some places, this is an unusually thoughtful memoir that avoids the twin pitfalls of self-pity and arrogance. (10 b&w photos, not seen) (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 22, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-193107-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 1995
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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