A focused, intelligent exploration of a parent's betrayal, leading to the hard-won discoveries that constitute the author's own ongoing education of the heart. When Corbett's physician-father abandoned his wife, his medical practice, his dog, and his Connecticut home in 1965, he also left behind two grown sons. The note Corbett Sr. left tacked to the door said, ``I have gone to further my education.'' This cold fact opens the book and permeates every page. As he fled the country, the good doctor left a further cryptic message with the author's wife, Beverly, saying that ``things aren't what they seem.'' Poet and essayist Corbett (Philip Guston's Late Work: A Memoir, not reviewed), a lecturer in writing at MIT and poetry editor of Grand Street, here employs an appealingly plain style to describe his efforts to delve into the mystery of his father's life and relations. He realizes that his father was for some reason unable ultimately to love. ``That adhesion that bonds parent to child, that inexplicable surge of love for your own flesh and blood . . . must not have taken between my father and me. Or this bond weakened during his years at war,'' writes Corbett, who in reconstructing his father's story also traces his own emotional and literary development, including his admittedly formless and overwritten early attempts to narrate this difficult material. Corbett patiently and lucidly dissects the triangle of affections and hesitancies he formed with his parents, now both deceased. He effectively captures the mood of tragicomedy surrounding family members in the days immediately following his father's leaving, and artfully details the ensuing strains of his relationship with his mother. The son's insights seem to issue, finally, as much from revealed history as from his own gift for thoughtful self- examination undertaken over the years. These insights are expressed in an understated narrative exhibiting great clarity, perspective, and order.
Pub Date: April 1, 1997
ISBN: 0-944072-74-7
Page Count: 224
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1997
BOOK REVIEW
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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