A pleasantly expressive story with two primary morals: You never know what will happen, and you can find support when things...
Fate works in mysterious ways, as a man with a lifelong passion for singing achieves fame at the age of 80.
This is a son’s memoir of life with his father and of his undistinguished father’s life well before the author was born. Though McDermott’s father, Ted, was not a successful professional singer and the author isn’t a professional writer, this story has a strong, sentimental pull, as the viral response to the videos of the father’s singing have attested. The elephant in the room is the Alzheimer’s to which it appeared the author had lost Ted. Though the family had been late to acknowledge it, Ted had become a totally different man: dangerously belligerent, accusatory, and denying there was anything amiss. “Alzheimer’s is a thief—it takes away all the light in family life and robs you of normality,” writes the author. “Even the shape of the word looks like it’s going to attack you. It strips you of precious moments and possible memories.” The narrative also pivots on an earlier before-and-after, the 40-plus years before Ted became a father, much of which he spent as a working-class singer on various bandstands, trying his best to support himself and perhaps delay the rooted responsibilities of adulthood. A crooner amid the rise of the Beatles, he saw this phase of his life come to an end when he impregnated a casual girlfriend and belatedly married her. The marriage that produced Ted’s only son was disharmonious throughout, but they somehow persevered through frequent arguments and occasional breakups. Then came the Alzheimer’s and the discovery that only through music could Ted reconnect with his former self. What followed was a video that went viral, a surprisingly successful fundraising campaign for Alzheimer’s support, a flurry of publicity and TV appearances by the son, a recording contract for Ted, and, now, this book.
A pleasantly expressive story with two primary morals: You never know what will happen, and you can find support when things are darkest.Pub Date: Sept. 4, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-7783-1374-8
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Park Row Books
Review Posted Online: June 17, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2018
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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