Despite an occasionally pedantic tone, Schneebaum tells an astonishing tale with exceptional verve and brio. (11 b&w...
The account of an extended walkabout in search of “people who would accept me, teach me how to live without a feeling of aloneness, teach me love and allow for my sexuality”—which Schneebaum (Where the Spirits Dwell, 1987) finds in New Guinea and, to a lesser extent, New York City.
Schneebaum’s memoir often reads like an anthropological investigation into the life of the Asmat people of New Guinea, with whom he has lived for at least a part of each of the last 25 years. With the Asmat he found intellectual, spiritual, and self-expressive fulfillment—through the art of their carvings (“the power and ferocity of the carvings, in fact, invaded my dreams”), through his own writings on them (chronicling their everyday lives and customs), and through “the world of sexual excitement.” Schneebaum describes his sexual life in New Guinea (as well as in New York City) with candor and gusto, although the Asmat world of sexuality is far more relaxed, in a way that gay sexuality couldn’t have been in New York City over the last two decades. The author is an enthusiastic participant and informal observer, giving vivid descriptions of Asmat dance, stories, myths, hunting, eating, clothing, and art. He lovingly depicts the process of carving works for practical, ceremonial, and decorative applications, and he delights in strange juxtapositions (such as “preparing a proper Seder in the swamps of New Guinea”). Schneebaum’s delivery can be pugnacious, but his material is so otherworldly to the Western reader that it will very likely raise plenty of eyebrows—although it makes for good storytelling.
Despite an occasionally pedantic tone, Schneebaum tells an astonishing tale with exceptional verve and brio. (11 b&w photographs)Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-299-16990-1
Page Count: 168
Publisher: Univ. of Wisconsin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2000
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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