A successful anesthesiologist commits to writing a letter every day to his best and longest friend after learning that she had been recovering from brain surgery.
In his brief introduction to this epistolary collection, Boggs explains his project as an attempt to stimulate his friend’s brain by amusing her with “stories, some funny, some bittersweet, about what the years had done to me since we had spent all of our days together from elementary through high school.” Peppered with poems, illustrations and quotes from people like Oscar Wilde and Rodney Dangerfield, every letter ranges between two and five pages and is generally a thoughtful, personal exploration of Boggs’ present goings-on or whatever topic happens to be on his mind. In letters dated between mid-March to early May 2009, Boggs recounts personal anecdotes and intimate memories about his childhood in Albuquerque, medical school in Chicago, trips to Istanbul and Mexico City and, among other places, working temporarily in Greenville, Miss., from where he wrote a number of the letters. But mostly he writes about small-town life in Gaffney, S.C., where he and his family lived for 20 years, recounting the mayor, whom everyone called "Chicken Jolly," and the various men who have shamelessly hit on his wife. Each letter functions as an almost-essay, a highly personal exercise in memory and creativity, but collectively form something more akin to a memoir, in which he exposes his passion for Latino dance music and ’70s rock album cover art, the history of vehicles he’s owned, the stories of old girlfriends, his Buddhist-leaning protestant faith and the surprising ease of sending his second daughter off to school after the difficulty of sending his first. At times strikingly insightful and often quite witty, Boggs writes with impressive consistency, sometimes openly battling writers’ block and winning every time. Most readers will find Boggs’ resulting meandering to be enjoyable, while others will likely want more structure or depth from his musings, such as his criticism of the Google era, where he fails to go beyond lamenting that “there is something wonderful about the open-endedness of not knowing everything.” Rather than offering insight into the makings of an intimate friendship, Boggs emphasizes the results of his friendship with Dinah, one that serves as a platform for illuminating nostalgia, nonromantic love and storytelling. A sincere, original tribute to the art of letter writing, small-town living and friendship.
Pub Date: Aug. 29, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463442873
Page Count: 212
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2011
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
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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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