by Slash Coleman ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 16, 2013
An uneven but entertaining examination of the plight of an artist’s progeny.
Professional storyteller and Psychology Today blogger Coleman looks to his past in this eclectic coming-of-age memoir.
Acutely aware of the influences of his drifter sculptor father, “a cross between Ringo Starr and Daniel Boone,” and Holocaust-surviving mother, the author trumpets the bohemian tendencies that inspired his own artistic development. Early on, the author describes his father’s recurrent escape fantasy of road-tripping to Alaska with a clarity that essentially characterizes the thematic structure of the memoir and his life: “saturated with abandon and testosterone and bound with some kind of twisted love plot.” Buffeted on the one hand by his artist father’s rather public paranoia concerning all things adult and, on the other, his mother’s fear of self-revelation, Coleman’s identity formed in the fulcrum of these opposing forces, and he displayed a dramatic penchant for passionate attachments and anti-establishment behavior. As the author matured, he often found himself pining for some unattainable or unsustainable love interest while trying and often failing to measure up to traditional expectations, whether in an MFA writing program or the workplace. One particularly memorable scene occurred in Maine, where Coleman had landed a temporary position as a substitute teacher and had been asked to give a talk on education at a fundraiser for the incumbent governor. His original plan was to “speak for five minutes and then give a short whirling dervish demonstration.” Instead, for some reason unbeknownst even to him, Coleman slowly removed all his clothing, which resulted in the eventual losses of both his job and his love at the time. While the author’s account exhibits flashes of humor and thoughtful introspection—passages analyzing his mother’s reasons for hiding her Jewish identity prove especially moving—the memoir is far too episodic and inconsistent to cohere.
An uneven but entertaining examination of the plight of an artist’s progeny.Pub Date: July 16, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-7627-8698-5
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Lyons Press
Review Posted Online: June 22, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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