A rare, lyrical family memoir that rises above banal domesticity.
The author’s account of growing up with a former Black Panther for a father in a disintegrating corner of Baltimore.
Unlike so many of his compatriots in the Black Power movement, Paul Coates didn’t burn out in disappointment after the heat of ’60s idealism turned to ash. Instead, he raised his family, a polyglot mix of children from four mothers, to exacting standards in a Baltimore that by the time of the author’s childhood in the late ’70s and early ’80s was experiencing a drug-and-violence-fueled societal breakdown. In Coates’s poetic account of his youth, Paul provided a bulwark against the buffeting waves of the crack wars outside: “We were a close-knit circle, but a circle surrounded by dire wolves.” While Paul rescued the works of lost or little-known writers through his Black Classic Press (still in existence) and pushed his children to succeed, the author watched with mixed worry and jealousy as his older brother Bill ran the streets and built his rep. The details of Coates’s travels through disintegrating neighborhoods and schools that seemed almost designed to torment a bookish, dreamy kid would be pedestrian in many writers’ hands, but he wields words with a rare grace that gives his story an uncommon power. “The world was filled with great causes—Mandela, Nicaragua, and the battle against Reagan,” Coates writes. “But we died for sneakers stitched by serfs, coats that gave props to teams we didn’t own, hats embroidered with the names of Confederate states.” It’s one of the saddest descriptions of the crack epidemic ever put to page. Given the tragic number of African-Americans who didn’t survive that epidemic, it’s a pleasure to read the author’s awed appraisal of a father who never stopped striving for the best in his family and community, no matter how hopeless the view outside his window.
A rare, lyrical family memoir that rises above banal domesticity.Pub Date: May 6, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-385-52036-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2008
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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