Meets the very high standard set by Alfred Kazin’s Starting Out in the Thirties for describing a young man’s intellectual...
Noted editor Solotaroff picks up where Truth Comes in Blows (1998) left off, describing with compassionate acuity the difficult early adult years that led to his vocation as a literary journalist.
He begins in the summer of 1948, when the 19-year-old Navy veteran meets Lynn Ringler, “a glowing girl with a sexy-arty look and a brooding inner life.” Their romance is bumpy during his first two years as an undergraduate at Ann Arbor, and even after they marry, in 1950, she’s prone to severe depression, not helped by their bumpy sex life and Solotaroff’s uncertainty about whether he should commit himself to fiction (at which several friends tell him he’s not so hot) or a scholarly career, for which he is better suited but unenthusiastic. Two sons, his graduate work at the University of Chicago, and extreme poverty further strain their relationship, which Solotaroff analyzes candidly and, insofar as an outsider can judge, fairly. He writes with equal vividness and perception about mid-20th-century academic stars (Morton Dauwen Zabel, Leslie Fiedler) and ordinary folks (an East Chicago working-class student provides the most moving scene). The best portions here, though, delineate the author’s struggle to reconcile his need to make a living, which a university professorship can provide, with his love for the exciting new literature being published by writers like Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and grad-school pal Philip Roth. Their work demonstrates that the ethnic origins Solotaroff shares could be the stuff of great fiction, though he is increasingly aware he will not be the one writing it. Then an essay on Roth leads to an article about Jewish-American writers in The Times Literary Supplement and lunch in New York with Norman Podhoretz, who offers him a job as associate editor at Commentary. The die is cast, but his marriage survives only two more years.
Meets the very high standard set by Alfred Kazin’s Starting Out in the Thirties for describing a young man’s intellectual coming-of-age with nuanced honesty and genuine emotion. Let’s hope Solotaroff doesn’t take five more years to get to New American Review.Pub Date: June 26, 2003
ISBN: 1-58322-582-X
Page Count: 298
Publisher: Seven Stories
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2003
BOOK REVIEW
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
