Rushin provides convincing evidence that life in the ’70s wasn’t as chaotic as it’s often made out to be.
An award-winning sportswriter looks back, mostly fondly, at a childhood in the 1970s in a Minnesota suburb.
As the anxious middle child in a Catholic family with four boys and one girl, overseen by a housewife mother and a father who traveled around the world selling eight-track tape for 3M, Sports Illustrated writer Rushin (The 34-Ton Bat: The Story of Baseball as Told Through Bobbleheads, Cracker Jacks, Jockstraps, Eye Black, and 375 Other Strange and Unforgettable Objects, 2013, etc.) may not have been able to compete with his athletic older brothers for glory on the playing field, but he pleased his parents with a talent for puns and other wordplay and himself with a collection of baseball cards. For a future sportswriter, he had the good fortune to grow up in Bloomington when the city was home to all the major Minnesota sports teams: the Vikings, the Twins, and the North Stars. While Rushin still appears to bear a bit of resentment toward his oldest brother, the administrator of the “Indian Burn” and the “Dutch Rub,” he clearly respects and admires his lovingly involved father and particularly his mother, with her concern that her children should avoid the awful fate of being perceived as “hillbillies.” The author devotes much of the narrative to the pop culture of the 1970s: the titular bicycle, the candy cigarettes the boys brandished, the near worship of Farrah Fawcett, and the fear-inspiring experiences of seeing The Poseidon Adventure and Jaws on the big screen. Although frequent sidetracks into generic comments on life in middle America (the absence of seat belt use and the frequency of smoking) and asides about the history of Midwest-created objects such as the Nerf ball and the Weber grill sometimes detract from the author’s personal story, the nostalgic sweetness of his memories carries the book along comfortably.
Rushin provides convincing evidence that life in the ’70s wasn’t as chaotic as it’s often made out to be.Pub Date: July 3, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-316-39223-5
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: May 8, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2017
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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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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