While the family history isn’t enthralling to outsiders, and the discussions of funeral customs and burial lore tend to the...
A writing teacher takes on duties as sexton of a small cemetery and gains new material for her craft, along with insights into the business of living and dying.
As Applegate (Skookum: An Oregon Pioneer Family’s History and Lore, 1996) assumes management of the five-acres, the final resting place of her ancestors as well as many of the residents of the little town of Yoncalla, Ore., she ponders both her own family’s past and the customs surrounding death, funerals and burials. When the town’s beloved physician dies, Applegate’s involvement with the arrangements leads her to a brief history of flowers in funeral rites, and when a cemetery cleanup calls for removal of old plastic flowers, broken jars and assorted items she regards as trash—football cards and glow-in-the-dark rubber snakes—she looks at grave goods as a window into cultural values. The pruning of overgrown trees in the cemetery leads to a consideration of their symbolism, as the cleaning of headstones (including her great-great-grandparents’ marker) leads to thought on their design, while seeing teenagers at the graveside of a boy who killed himself raises thoughts about the treatment of suicides. Applegate also touches on the crowding of urban cemeteries, the disturbance of graves, the removal of bones, the changing language of funerals and the growing trend toward cremation. Her sense of family is strong, as she embraces long-dead ancestors, among them her father, younger brother and granddaughter, all three having died during the writing of this book. Throughout, there are line drawings and photos of Applegates and their homes, headstones and cemetery trees, plus the (rather odd) image of a treadmill where Applegate had a disturbing encounter with the mother of a buried child.
While the family history isn’t enthralling to outsiders, and the discussions of funeral customs and burial lore tend to the superficial, what the author says about being a small-town sexton is fresh and interesting.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 1-56025-677-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2005
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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