by Wade Stevenson ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 1, 2008
A choppy but impassioned chronicle powered by a perpetual quest for love.
A Buffalo-based writer’s affecting if protean memoir about Parisian life and love during the decade of liberation.
Stevenson’s life in western New York was a turbulent one. As a child, he was emotionally scarred by his blue-collar father, who continually told him he was worthless–he then watched his mother die of polio complications. Eager to dismiss him, his father shipped Stevenson off to a Connecticut boarding school at 13. Years later, the author left the East Coast, falling in love with a German teacher during a short-lived stint at a college in northern California. He returned to New York, but in short order his perpetually disappointed father tricked Stevenson into being committed to a psychiatric ward, convinced he was mentally unstable. Months passed and Stevenson was eventually deemed of sound mind. He hurriedly boarded an oil tanker where he worked until disembarking at Le Havre, France, and then moved to Paris, where freedom embraced his lonely, searching heart. Living a Francophile’s life, he barely subsisted on bread, cheese and cheap wine, living humbly in “something like a room in a cellar.” Stevenson traversed his new environs alone until encountering a young blond model named Cynthia, whom he’d seen wandering the halls of the same New York psychiatric ward he’d attended. Stevenson was instantly smitten, though soon received word from a relative of his acceptance into Harvard. But at 19, the allure of Paris drew him in further, despite the fact that Cynthia’s increasingly erratic behavior hinted at more serious problems. Neither her free-spirited good friends Ode, Charlie and Gloria nor a possible Vietnam War draft could divide them, but while their attraction deepened, minor indiscretions caused an undeniable rift. Though Paris offered all the charm, wonderment and romantic possibility Stevenson could have ever wanted, he departed brokenhearted. The memoir’s timeline evolves in fits and starts, but Stevenson eventually warms to the form and goes on to dictate a life of yearning love and personal enrichment. Its preciseness and melodramatic feel, however, strains its credibility.
A choppy but impassioned chronicle powered by a perpetual quest for love.Pub Date: May 1, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-595-486588
Page Count: -
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 23, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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