Livingston overcomes the collection’s inconsistencies with her dexterity in addressing an impressive range of questions...
Livingston (MFA Program/Univ. of Memphis; Ghostbread, 2009) weaves her own memories throughout ruminations on famous mythical goddesses and pop-culture icons to explore what becoming a woman means both for her—as a Roman Catholic girl coming of age in the late 1980s—and, more broadly, within the context of the real and fictitious women who surround her.
“Shopping days were like a holiday to a family of seven children,” writes the author in “Our Lady of the Lakes.” Although her mother, a single parent living in poverty, usually bought off-brand, “or—God forbid—margarine,” sometimes they were graced with the presence of Land O’Lakes butter. Livingston describes how her siblings would fight about who could play with the package’s cardboard panels. They all wanted to be the one to fold the package just right so that the maiden’s knees became a “stunning pair of breasts, the polished divots looking for all the world like perfectly bronzed nipples.” The author’s balancing act between her own narrative and the backdrop of larger cultural images of womanhood threads throughout this collection, as she tackles such subjects as fertility, teenage pregnancy, loss, and poverty. Some essays—e.g., “The Lady with the Alligator Purse,” which explores her fascination with Susan B. Anthony—have notes of playfulness. “What I’m most interested in,” Livingston tells a friend, “is whether the woman ever had any fun.” Others pieces are decidedly more somber—e.g., “One for Sorrow,” in which the author shares the unique ways young girls lied to her in her time as a school counselor. While Livingston’s prose shines, the pacing and cohesion of the collection occasionally feel off—some topics are exhaustive, while others, like her relationship with her niece, will leave readers wanting more.
Livingston overcomes the collection’s inconsistencies with her dexterity in addressing an impressive range of questions regarding humanity, femininity, and growing up in America.Pub Date: April 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8067-0
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2015
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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