Tag Archives: memoir

Bookshelf – Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates (2)

Posted on by
Reply

This is a short observation about reading vs. listening:

When I first read “Between the World and Me” three years ago (a bit late to the game), its unblinking directness astounded me and my truculent ignorance ashamed me. I wrote:

“There are sounds in life so distinct and universal they cannot be mistaken for anything else – the tumble and hiss of heavy surf onto sand, the guttural reverb of distant thunder, the ominous hustle of night winds through tall trees.

“To these voices of the world I would add that of Ta-Nehisi Coates, who speaks through the pages of this epistolary essay about blackness and whiteness in America with such honesty and authenticity that from now on I will measure the veracity of all other literary voices against his.”

Just the other day, I listened to Coates’s narration of the book and found it to be even more profound. His voice, eloquent, educated, but still inflected by the streets of West Baltimore, amplifies the wisdom, truth and necessity of his written words. Heard aloud, their poetry flourishes even further, as does their urgency.

If you have not read Between the World and Me, I urge you to do so. If you have read it, I suggest you also listen to it.

(Original review)

Bookshelf — Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder – Salman Rushdie

Posted on by
Reply

All memoirs should be measured against this harrowing account by Salman Rushdie of the 2022 attack that nearly killed him and left him half-blind: detailed, unblinking, contextual, and surprisingly soulful – all packed with precision into two-hundred pages.

To hijack a phrase I’m sure I picked up from someone else’s review: “Knife” is a display of Rushdie in full command of his talents: inventiveness, intellectual breadth, insight into the foibles of humanity, and an emotional spectrum that runs from anger to fear to love to outrage.

Rushdie lived beneath the sword since 1989 when Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran issued a fatwa calling for his execution, proclaiming that Rushdie’s book, “The Satanic Verses,” defamed Muhammad.  With time, the threat seemed to diminish. Still, says Rushdie, he was not surprised one day, while standing on stage, to see a young man appear from the audience and lunge toward him with a knife.

“I confess,” he says, “I had sometimes imagined my assassin rising up in some public forum or other and coming for me in just this way. So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing toward me was: So it’s you. Here you are. It is said that Henry James’s last words were ‘So it has come at last, the distinguished thing.’ Death was coming at me, too.”

The book begins here and follows Rushdie’s journey of recovery and rediscovery – of who he is, of what he loves and why, and of the importance of art and honesty in a pluralistic society.

“I had to write the book you’re reading now.” he says, “before I could move on to anything else. To write would be my way of owning what had happened, taking charge of it, making it mine, refusing to be a mere victim. I would answer violence with art.”

Indeed, “Knife” is art – it is personal, yet universal; it is wisdom distilled from pain; it answers the question everyone must face when calamity confronts them: “One has to find life … One can’t just sit about recovering from near death. One has to find life.”