How President Jimmy Carter’s late younger brother, Billy, dealt with instant celebrity when the media stereotyped him as a southern “redneck” and “ol” boy” freak, as told by Billy’s son. Buddy writes of his own youth in a hardworking blue-collar family in the small, rural town of Plains, Ga. Billy had matured in the family warehouse business of processing peanut, soybean, and cotton crops, proving himself a successful manager and a serious, dedicated family provider. Billy also enjoyed relaxing with lifelong friends in his “station” (a combined auto-service shop and snack bar). When Jimmy returned home after ten years in the navy, he ran the family business before becoming governor of Georgia and president of the US. Suddenly, reporters, photographers, PR people, cheap souvenir stands, and thousands of tourists intruded on quiet Plains. When the media discovered Billy, who had lost control of his cherished warehouse, having a beer, a legend was born. He was offered unheard-of profitable deals and exploited as an amusing redneck character actor, selling Billy Beer and appearing on endless talk shows. Despite his leap in income, his family was mortified as they saw their beloved, witty father and husband turned into a buffoon. Billy descended into alcoholism and was discarded by his exploiters as he was harassed by the IRS and the FBI, investigating a suspicious deal with Libya. He eventually recovered and tried to rebuild his former life, even though the family business went bankrupt and Jimmy lost his reelection bid. Buddy, author of the novel The Search for Savin” Sam (not reviewed), shows a genuine talent for writing in this poignant, highly emotional profile of a complex man, adored by his family and friends, whose once contented life was changed by a media onslaught and a controlling disease. A touching account by a son who loved his father deeply and skillfully describes how fame and fortune can almost destroy a life.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1999
ISBN: 1-56352-553-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Longstreet
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 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
BOOK REVIEW
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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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