Playwright (The Miracle Worker: Two For the Seesaw) William Gibson's A Mass for the Dead is primarily an offertory to his parents, a mother whom no one could touch for "brightness of heart or kitchen," a father always "alive and imperfect," remembered here not only to defy the finality of death but also to retain the continuity of their lives through his-through his children's. It is also an audit of his own growing up and growing away: from the small change of a childhood in the Bronx (marbles, soda pop, and a ten cent allowance) it proceeds to the currency of more universal values. Unabashedly emotional in spots, sometimes rather formless in technique, there are still remarkable scenes: of a grandmother (his mother's mother) who played the horses but never was seen without her of her little black arrings, who survived to bury a husband and fourteen sons: of his father and his long terminal illness when he became "so close to inhuman earth again": and particularly of his mother who scrubbed and cleaned her way through other people's houses as well as her own, fighting for the consanguinity of blood and love, and retaining an indomitable spirit until the end of her "72 years of workaday bones." There will be those who will not respond to the poetic and lyrical insets which follow the schemata of the Catholic mass, but the book, as a testament, as a testimonial, is unarguably affirmative and alive. Literary Guild selection and expected wide appeal.
Pub Date: March 25, 1968
ISBN: 0689705425
Page Count: 452
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: March 30, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1968
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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