A polished nonfiction writer exercises his powers of observation and his writer’s craft to reflect on his own marriage’s collapse. The title Taylor, formerly a contributor to Esquire and New York magazines (Circus of Ambition: The Culture of Power and Wealth in the Eighties, 1989), has selected for this memoir reveals his self-consciously honest and positive approach to the subject of his marriage’s demise as part of a larger whole. Aside from the effortless precision of his prose and his male perspective, it’s Taylor’s tone that distinguishes his story. Sadness, not bitterness, fills the book. As he describes the slow breakdown of his 11-year marriage (“a mechanism so encrusted with small disappointments and petty grudges that its parts no longer closed”) and surveys the consequences of separation, Taylor feels a deep sense of loss—both for his family and for the part of himself that was defined by his family. In a series of 32 brief chapters, Taylor entertainingly (albeit selectively) familiarizes us with the individuals and circumstances that contributed to his marital situations: himself and his own family, his wife and her background, their meeting, falling into marriage, and falling “through the darkness” out of it. In between we meet the cherished daughter, Taylor’s demanding or silly lovers, assorted divorcing friends and neighbors, marriage counselors, and finally, the marriage mediator and financial advisor who guided Taylor and his wife toward separation. Linking the assorted scenes and personalities is Taylor’s narrative, driven by a formidable ego (as a journalist, he lost a job due to his “attitude”) and by his search for “moral clarification.” Falling represents, in literary form, Taylor’s attempt to achieve such clarity and to come to terms with his own dishonesty and responsibility in the marriage’s failure. Taylor’s writing has style, but this book will most interest those—be they single, married, or divorced—with a curiosity about the most intimate details of someone else’s marriage. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-50094-4
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1998
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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
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