Deficient in the cultural insights that would have enriched the memories.
In a series of color-drenched chapters accompanied by recipes, food and travel writer Narayan recalls growing up in India and studying in the US.
Place and taste take center stage, often at the expense of story, in a narrative focused as much on particular foods as on milestones in the author’s life. Born in South India, Narayan begins with the Hindu rice-eating ceremony traditionally held when a baby is six months old to mark the transition from liquids to solids. The baby is offered a mix of rice and ghee, the melted butter described in the recipe that follows as “the vegetarian’s caviar: slightly sinful, somewhat excessive, but oh so delicious.” The author describes her grandmother making vatrals and vadams before the monsoon, because these thin slices of vegetables had to dry to a crisp on the rooftop before they could be stored. At school Narayan traded lunches, even though as a vegetarian she could eat only the rice in the chicken biriyani swapped by a Muslim classmate. She recalls shopping in the produce market, visiting her grandparents, attending festivals, surviving adolescence, and achieving academic success, lyrically evoking the tastes and textures of a world where rice was still ground on a stone, pickles and chutneys were made at home, and milk was delivered daily at the door by the cow herself. Though appreciative of her heritage, Narayan wanted to study in the US, which her parents reluctantly allowed after she graduated from college. There she reveled in the freedom to study what she liked (sculpture and drama), to meet a wider range of people, and to eat (if not always enjoy) different foods. Narayan’s cooking skills stood her in good stead when she catered a dinner to raise funds for her tuition. Then her family began pressuring her to return and marry a man of their choosing; she reluctantly accepted, but imposed certain conditions.
Deficient in the cultural insights that would have enriched the memories.Pub Date: April 22, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50756-6
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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