Without wasting a word, Grimes presents a thoroughly readable view of how stories—and writers, at least of a certain...
An illuminating account of a writer’s life under the tutelage of another writer.
Today, Frank Conroy (1936–2005) is not read as much as he should be, but his harrowing memoir Stop-Time (1967) was required reading among aspiring writers for decades. Though he didn’t publish much thereafter, Conroy became the head of the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop and had trained a generation of teachers, novelists and poets by the time Grimes (Creative Writing/Texas State Univ.; City of God, 1995, etc.) arrived in Iowa City. That arrival seemed unlikely at first. After Conroy snubbed Grimes, then working as a waiter, at a Key West literary gathering, Grimes responded by tearing up a copy of Conroy’s book. Yet Conroy, whose gruffness masked a certain reserve, turned out to be a generous teacher, awarding an already accomplished Grimes a fellowship and a coveted place in seminars—favors fraught with peril in the Hobbesian political world of the university. Some of Grimes’s education took place in smoky bars over many drinks, for “Frank ignored warnings about high cholesterol, got drunk nightly, and couldn’t write without a cigarette.” Yet that education was thorough and grounded, and what Grimes tells of it—lessons that might be condensed into the credo, Pay attention—will be of benefit to any aspiring writer, though no substitute for reading voraciously and writing unforgivingly. Grimes delivers an eloquent portrait of the writer’s life, which is often solitary and difficult—though, despite his own history, not necessarily mired in madness (Prozac helped). The author writes self-effacingly, and sometimes quite humorously, as when he reveals the incestuous logrolling of academic writers—you teach my book, and I’ll blurb yours—and the mechanics of the publishing world (as one insider scolds him, “The next time you get an offer from Farrar, Straus, take it”).
Without wasting a word, Grimes presents a thoroughly readable view of how stories—and writers, at least of a certain kind—are made.Pub Date: Aug. 15, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-9825048-8-8
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Tin House
Review Posted Online: June 3, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2010
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
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