An eloquent and charming, if somewhat aimless, memoir and travelogue.
A posthumous collection of essays and musings by a well-traveled man.
Thomas “Tom” Peyton, born in Duluth, Minn., saw many of the world’s sights over the course of his 91 years, from the Eiffel Tower to Ivory Coast. Although his debut memoir focuses primarily on his international travel, his memories of his Midwestern upbringing also appear. For example, in his opening essay, “Domestic Animals in My Life,” he offers an overly extensive history of his family’s dogs. However, readers may have liked to have learned more about the people in his “eminently Victorian household,” over which his father “ruled.” Peyton also recalls his encounters with several iconic historical figures—some at a great distance, others close enough for a handshake. As a spectator at the 1936 Berlin Olympics, for example, 17-year-old Peyton found Adolf Hitler to be “a small man of undistinguished shape and clothed in…rather ill-fitting military garb.” He adds, rather chillingly: “This was the man destined to play such a huge part in…the future of every one of us.” Of his service in the U.S. Air Force during World War II, Peyton writes, “I never left an occupation more willingly.” He joined the Peace Corps in 1962, answering what he called his “ethical demands,” and met President John F. Kennedy in the process. Peyton’s time in the Peace Corps inspired some of his best writing, not only in his memoirs, but also in his letters to his mother, in which he detailed the joys and frustrations of teaching in Ivory Coast. His sense of humor and prose skills also emerge, as in his description of “colonial society”: “[H]eavy men purple with drink and very liverish; women waiting only to be repatriated, totally without curiosity toward the world in which they find themselves.” The writing veers toward dry reportage when he chronicles his travels later in life, joined by his friend Osama Ettouney. Peyton eventually covered a truly impressive amount of ground, including Egypt, Greece, the Czech Republic, Italy, Brussels, Portugal and Luxembourg. At times, the author’s visual imagery is sharp (as when he describes “[e]meralds the size of a giant’s fingernail” in Istanbul, but more often, he simply retells the history of the world he so eagerly explored.
An eloquent and charming, if somewhat aimless, memoir and travelogue.Pub Date: Oct. 4, 2013
ISBN: 978-1490593616
Page Count: 308
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 29, 2013
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
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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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