Candid and affecting.
Journalist Rodrick's powerful debut chronicles the long, difficult process of coming to terms with the untimely death of his father, a Navy pilot.
Black Ravens squadron commander Peter Rodrick was just 36 in 1979, when his airplane went down in the Indian Ocean. After his son turned the same age in 2002, Stephen's then-wife told him that he wouldn’t be “a proper father" until he "made peace" with his dad. The younger Rodrick tried, writing an article about Navy pilots on the Kitty Hawk, his father’s last ship, but Pete remained the enigmatic “magical stranger” of his childhood. The peacemaking task didn't begin in earnest until Stephen received an invitation to a ceremony involving Pete’s old squadron in 2009. Getting to know the Black Ravens’ newly commissioned commander, James Hunter Ware III, he realized, would help him better understand his father. The resulting narrative weaves between Rodrick’s memories of a brilliant, mysterious father and his account of Ware’s personal and professional trials in the same job. Peter Rodrick was a dedicated officer and fearless “cowboy” pilot, but he left the task of guiding his wayward son to a beleaguered wife against whom Stephen battled throughout his childhood and adolescence. By contrast, Ware struggled with his competing allegiances to the Navy and a wife who had sacrificed everything for him. Through his examination of both men’s lives, the author came to accept his father and understand that the accident was not the result of Pete's “sin” of reckless bravado. Finding closure with his father’s death, he could finally acknowledge the quietly heroic role of his mother. It was ultimately she, he concludes, who made him “worthy” of the Rodrick name.
Candid and affecting.Pub Date: May 14, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-200476-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2013
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
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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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