Remarkable neither in prose nor plotting, this memoir is still compelling and inspiring.
An autobiography that very much resembles a 20th-century, African-American Horatio Alger novel.
Byrd’s life story traces a remarkable arc. Born fatherless, black and poor in Mississippi in the late 1930s, he appeared to have the entire deck stacked against him. However, the successful and prosperous life he subsequently carves out proves that a strong sense of community, a supportive family, a positive attitude and a little luck can launch one beyond the bounds of even the most suffocating of socio-economical or historical circumstances. In many ways a classic picaresque novel, The author’s story is episodic, following the adventures of a loveable rogue–getting his sister in trouble as a kid, actively working as a ghetto pool hustler as a teenager and even loan-sharking during his time in the Navy–as he moves from place to place, adventure to adventure, sliding easily among various social milieu and surviving primarily on his wits. Despite the neatly packaged life lessons offered in the final chapter, a surprising measure of amorality and chaos dominates much of Byrd’s life–through luck alone, he often narrowly escapes serious trouble that would have severely altered the eventual course of his life. Luck aside, the author’s innate ability to make friends everywhere he goes, his belief that everyone should walk away from the table with something and his devotion to balancing work with fun are the qualities that allowed him to have a long and distinguished military and civil-service career–and to make meaningful headway in establishing racial equality in the Navy. For all those accomplishments, however, there is very little sense of teleology here. Byrd simply tells his story and lets the threads lead where they may. Readers not accustomed to the desultory oral storytelling style of the South are likely to be annoyed by the apparent lack of focus, especially given the exaggerated haphazardness of this narrative. It is clear that the author is a storyteller firmly ensconced in the oral tradition and that much is lost in the translation of his story into print.
Remarkable neither in prose nor plotting, this memoir is still compelling and inspiring.Pub Date: March 30, 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4257-8588-8
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
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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