Dysfunctional family, the mystique of colonial Africa, grief over a dead relative: This debut has a lot going for it, but...
Fans of Alexandra Fuller’s Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight will enjoy this memoir of growing up in Rhodesia.
“Lauren, my youngest sister, was killed in a car accident on a straight and lonely road in Zambia in 1999.” After that opening line—whose adequate, but not especially lovely prose is representative of the rest of the book—Kann looks back to her childhood. Her mother was a “versatile, complicated drunk,” her father died in an accident that local gossips described as a suicide, and her stepmother, trying to bring up five children on little money, was both strong and needy, beautiful and manipulative. Kann managed to escape after falling in love with a gentle, sensitive American, Mickey, whom she followed to Manhattan and soon married. The couple eventually made their way to a suburban dreamland: three kids, sprawling house in Westport, Conn., pool men, gardeners. Kann filled her days with PTA meetings and carpool and “social obligations.” She kept up with her two sisters, who both lived in Africa. Kann was especially concerned about Lauren, whose husband was charming but emotionally abusive. Lauren whispered about her unhappiness whenever her sister phoned; the only bright spot in her life was her new baby, Luke. After Lauren’s fatal car crash, Kann rushed to Africa, spending many weeks caring for her young nephew. And then . . . well, not much, which is this memoir’s weakness. Kann has set us up for great emotional catharsis, for reckoning with one’s homeland, for confronting inner demons. What we get, instead, is a canned description of sorting through Lauren’s clothes, and a saccharine conversation on the trampoline with nephew Luke: “It’s hard for me to explain exactly how . . . special your mummy was. . . . She loved you so very much.”
Dysfunctional family, the mystique of colonial Africa, grief over a dead relative: This debut has a lot going for it, but never fully delivers.Pub Date: May 8, 2006
ISBN: 0-8050-7956-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2006
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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