In spare essays dealing with topics such as ``Secrets,'' ``A Woman's Place,'' ``Tears,'' and ``Home,'' novelist and memoirist Mori (Shizuko's Daughter, 1993; The Dream of Water, 1995) examines the ways truth is circumvented in America and in her native Japan. Now making her home in Wisconsin, the author sees herself as more American than Japanese, and from her newfound perspective she exposes such ``polite lies,'' or socially condoned and expected dissimulations, as the Japanese code of silence regarding matters of health (her father was not informed that he had malignant cancer), finance (the reticence of her father's bank cost Mori her inheritance), and family (the need for family secrecy kept her from seeking a lawyer). Of course, she argues, there are polite lies—religious rituals, for example, or the platitudes we utter in the face of adversity—that we need, that offer us comfort and may actually be preferable to harsh truths. Mori—who was 12 when she lost her mother to suicide—sees that death as a rejection of the polite lie of marital harmony and stability. For herself, unable to decide on a way of life that didn't involve compromise, the author chose divorce: ``If marriage meant sacrifice, mutual or one-sided, I wanted to be alone.'' This terse explanation, however, seems an oddly incomplete accounting for the end of her marriage. While she bravely sees through what she calls the polite fictions of her Japanese family and friends, Mori is rarely condemnatory. Her quiet prose seems to reflect the discipline of her personal belief system; it's as if the stoicism she was raised to practice in her behavior and thoughts is embedded even in her writing style. She is frank—but never deeply angry. Though there is a sameness to some of these essays, Mori's observations about lies and their consequences build to powerful effect.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1998
ISBN: 0-8050-4079-X
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1997
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
Dramatic, immersive, and wanting—much like desire itself.
Based on eight years of reporting and thousands of hours of interaction, a journalist chronicles the inner worlds of three women’s erotic desires.
In her dramatic debut about “what longing in America looks like,” Taddeo, who has contributed to Esquire, Elle, and other publications, follows the sex lives of three American women. On the surface, each woman’s story could be a soap opera. There’s Maggie, a teenager engaged in a secret relationship with her high school teacher; Lina, a housewife consumed by a torrid affair with an old flame; and Sloane, a wealthy restaurateur encouraged by her husband to sleep with other people while he watches. Instead of sensationalizing, the author illuminates Maggie’s, Lina’s, and Sloane’s erotic experiences in the context of their human complexities and personal histories, revealing deeper wounds and emotional yearnings. Lina’s infidelity was driven by a decade of her husband’s romantic and sexual refusal despite marriage counseling and Lina's pleading. Sloane’s Fifty Shades of Grey–like lifestyle seems far less exotic when readers learn that she has felt pressured to perform for her husband's pleasure. Taddeo’s coverage is at its most nuanced when she chronicles Maggie’s decision to go to the authorities a few years after her traumatic tryst. Recounting the subsequent trial against Maggie’s abuser, the author honors the triumph of Maggie’s courageous vulnerability as well as the devastating ramifications of her community’s disbelief. Unfortunately, this book on “female desire” conspicuously omits any meaningful discussion of social identities beyond gender and class; only in the epilogue does Taddeo mention race and its impacts on women's experiences with sex and longing. Such oversight brings a palpable white gaze to the narrative. Compounded by the author’s occasionally lackluster prose, the book’s flaws compete with its meaningful contribution to #MeToo–era reporting.
Dramatic, immersive, and wanting—much like desire itself.Pub Date: July 9, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4229-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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