This fragmentary memoir, supplemented by love letters from Theodore Dreiser, offers little of interest about either the author, her famous lover, or their relationship. In 1930, 17-year-old Yvette Szekely was seduced by ``groping Teddy,'' then in his late 50s. Their affair, which continued until Dreiser's death in 1945, was only one of several the novelist had while living with Helen Richardson (Yvette learned of the others in biographers' accounts of Dreiser's life). If the relationship developed, as Eastman claims, ``into a spiritual and emotional bond,'' this comes off the page less powerfully than do the furtive meetings in rented digs, the post office boxes leased to conceal correspondence exchanged, and the routine banter of epistles that—as love letters often do—sound banal to all but their intended recipient. Perhaps because Yvette was infatuated with Dreiser and his celebrity, her intimate perspective does not translate, even retrospectively, into incisive observation. The one person who does emerge from the memoir as genuinely intriguing is Margaret Szekely, who married Yvette's father and raised the girl as her own daughter (though the portrait is only partial and filtered through Yvette's residual anger). Emotionally volatile, creative, and undoubtedly difficult to live with even when she wasn't threatening suicide, Margaret was a journalist, inventor, and lingerie designer. Moreover, a passing reference in one of Dreiser's letters to Yvette's own suicide threat and the later revelation of Yvette's affair with Margaret's estranged husband, Ken Clark, leads to suspicions that the dark relationship between stepmother and stepdaughter—if it had been more fully explored—holds more potential interest than these rather dull reminiscences of the affair with Dreiser. (Szekely later married Max Eastman.) Essentially for those whose interests are academic or voyeuristic or both. (14 b&w photos, not seen)
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8122-3311-5
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Univ. of Pennsylvania
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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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