A masterful coming-out story in which the author's secret life involves not sexuality but blindness. Kuusisto, with a condition of the retinas that left him legally blind at birth, was raised by parents who denied his handicap. Consequently, he grew up disavowing his blindness and pretending to be able to see much better than he really could. He sees, he writes, ``through smeared and broken windowpanes,'' his impressions of the world ``at once beautiful and largely useless.'' A ridiculed child, at first obese and later anorexic, he developed a love for words, especially poetry. Despite his limitations, he graduated from the Iowa Writer's Workshop, was a Fulbright scholar in Finland, and taught creative writing at Hobart College for seven years. When that job ended, Kuusisto, alone, unemployed, and desperate, found himself face-to-face with the undeniable fact of his blindness, and he at last reached out for the help he'd always needed. After accepting the stigmatizing white cane of the blind that he had rejected ten years earlier, and learning to relish the safety and mobility it gave him, he moved on to Corky, a guide dog that changed his life entirely. Today, Kuusisto is director of student services for Guiding Eyes for the Blind, a training school where the blind are matched with guide dogs and trained to use them. He no longer pretends he can see what others see; at age 39, he says, he has chosen to be blind ``in a forceful way.'' Athough portions of this memoir have appeared in various literary magazines (Antioch Review, Harper's, etc.), the presentation here is seamless. An astonishing, occasionally dismaying, and sometimes heart-breaking glimpse of life on the planet of the blind. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Jan. 2, 1998
ISBN: 0-385-31615-1
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Dial Books
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
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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