sde's review against another edition
3.0
I received this book through a Goodreads giveaway.
I am a few years younger than Dubus, and I grew up south of Boston, not north, but still - this book was a blast from the past! For all the complaints about "kids these days," this book reminded me that kids were likely worse in previous generations, or at least my generation.
Dubus is a good writer, but I wish he had cut down the early stuff in the book a great deal. I really didn't need to have a blow-by-blow of every single fight or tiff he got into as a teenager. When I said it was a blast from the past - well, sometimes I felt like I was reliving my high school years in real time. Yeah, we get it - you felt you had to defend yourself, you were filled with anger and had quick-trigger reactions that were overreactions. As you matured and got to know yourself and your father better, you realized that this wasn't the way to go and turned your attitude around. The book would have been better with less description of the early years, and more description of how and why the author actually turned himself around. He had a pretty amazing transformation, but the book made it sound like it was sudden and fairly easy, which I'm guessing it wasn't in reality.
It also seemed like the end was rushed. It's almost like his editor said "You have X number of pages to write your story," and the author started writing and all of a sudden realized he was going to run out of pages and squeezed several years into a few pages. The jump from his detailing every single breath practically in his youth to all of a sudden him being grown up and married with not much explanation of how he got there, was jarring.
I know a big point of the book was the author's relationship with his father, also an author. However, I felt bad that his mother was almost an aside in the book. She was the one who scrambled to raise four kids as a single mom with little support from her ex-husband. She tried (not often successfully) to keep them in line while commuting long distances to a low paying job to help them scrape by. Maybe it's because I'm a mom, but I would have liked to see a little more information about her than the fun and interesting but hardly there father.
I am a few years younger than Dubus, and I grew up south of Boston, not north, but still - this book was a blast from the past! For all the complaints about "kids these days," this book reminded me that kids were likely worse in previous generations, or at least my generation.
Dubus is a good writer, but I wish he had cut down the early stuff in the book a great deal. I really didn't need to have a blow-by-blow of every single fight or tiff he got into as a teenager. When I said it was a blast from the past - well, sometimes I felt like I was reliving my high school years in real time. Yeah, we get it - you felt you had to defend yourself, you were filled with anger and had quick-trigger reactions that were overreactions. As you matured and got to know yourself and your father better, you realized that this wasn't the way to go and turned your attitude around. The book would have been better with less description of the early years, and more description of how and why the author actually turned himself around. He had a pretty amazing transformation, but the book made it sound like it was sudden and fairly easy, which I'm guessing it wasn't in reality.
It also seemed like the end was rushed. It's almost like his editor said "You have X number of pages to write your story," and the author started writing and all of a sudden realized he was going to run out of pages and squeezed several years into a few pages. The jump from his detailing every single breath practically in his youth to all of a sudden him being grown up and married with not much explanation of how he got there, was jarring.
I know a big point of the book was the author's relationship with his father, also an author. However, I felt bad that his mother was almost an aside in the book. She was the one who scrambled to raise four kids as a single mom with little support from her ex-husband. She tried (not often successfully) to keep them in line while commuting long distances to a low paying job to help them scrape by. Maybe it's because I'm a mom, but I would have liked to see a little more information about her than the fun and interesting but hardly there father.
beasneaz's review
3.0
I don't read a lot of non-fiction, memoirs included but I found this book strangely nourishing. Andre Dubus III details his struggles of growing up in a mill town in Massachusetts. He chronicles the experiences of his family and himself following the divorce of his father and mother. Dubus is plagued by a fear of weakness and this fear propelled him into years of violence before mellowing and discovering his love of writing. At times this this book made me cheer for Dubus as he slowly built himself into a fighter who felt he could finally defend himself and the ones he loved, while at others I could only view the author as a bully who sought to displace his pain by inflicting it on someone else.
The memoir is bittersweet and honest and I truly enjoyed this book more than I had anticipated. While some of the author's stories feel like an admission of guilt for the hurt he caused, the rest of the book feels like an honest view into the battles we face and the scars we carry. Each of us has a burden to carry and we simply do the best we think we can each and every day. I hope readers can appreciate the perspectives shown and take the lessons of empathy that Dubus III learns towards the end of the memoir. Honest, tragic, and fulfilling are the ways I would describe this book and I recommend it to all-even those who don't read non-fiction.
The memoir is bittersweet and honest and I truly enjoyed this book more than I had anticipated. While some of the author's stories feel like an admission of guilt for the hurt he caused, the rest of the book feels like an honest view into the battles we face and the scars we carry. Each of us has a burden to carry and we simply do the best we think we can each and every day. I hope readers can appreciate the perspectives shown and take the lessons of empathy that Dubus III learns towards the end of the memoir. Honest, tragic, and fulfilling are the ways I would describe this book and I recommend it to all-even those who don't read non-fiction.
katepowellshine's review
4.0
Initially I had trouble with this book. I didn't identify with anyone or anything in it much, and the style kept throwing me off to such a degree that I often had to re-read sentences to get the meaning. After about 20 pages I was afraid I wouldn't be able to finish. But I told myself I'd give it a fair chance so I kept reading. And continued to read. Eventually I found myself saying, 'I suppose I'll read more of that stupid book' even though I had a pile of others to entice me. By the time I finished that 'stupid' book, I was gushing about it to family members. So, I'm not sure what happened, but somewhere between start and finish I liked this book. And also disliked it.
mwyatt62's review
5.0
This is a powerful book by a powerful writer. It is similar to Angela's Ashes and The Glass Castle in that it is a harrowing portrait of a neglected childhood. It is different in that Dubus does not soften the blow with humor as the other two writers did. It is also more of a personal journey with its focus is more on the writer's own experience and how the conditions of his life led him first to violence and then to writing (lucky for us). It is not easy to read and I often wanted to shake him and tell him to be less forgiving of his parents--they did not do the best that they could do because they were not there for their children. But I can also appreciate that his trauma made him the writer he is today (I now understand the source of the dark story told in The House of Sand and Fog), and he seems to have emerged well-grounded with the tools to contribute to the world, so maybe what his parents did was enough.
elisabeth1st's review
4.0
Wow! This is a very powerful memoir. I assumed Andre Dubus III lived a privileged life as the son of author and professor, Andre Dubus. I was very wrong. His father was not present in his youth and his mother so busy working, not home to raise him. He and his siblings lived in poverty in the tough Haverhill, MA neighborhood and Andre learned to fight to compensate for his fears. This memoir is full of violence and anger. I was astonished by the brutality and uncontrollable rage Andre lived with. He put many young men in the hospital with his significant boxing abilities and it was only in his late twenties, early thirties that he found writing to be his release for the rage that was inside. The writing is magnificent. I’ve not read him before and will now read his earlier works.
atippmann's review
2.0
I like to read memoirs about people who grew up in tough situations (best one by far: "Glass Castle") and this one is similar. At the beginning, I really liked the stories about his poor family, but now the main character is obsessed with fighting everyone he sees, and learning to box. I'm not so into the endless descriptions of fights, but I'll keep plugging along...
joaniemaloney's review
5.0
And I felt more like me than I ever had, as if the years I'd lived so far had formed layers of skin and muscle over myself that others saw as me when the real one had been underneath all along, and writing - even writing badly - had peeled away those layers, and I knew then that if I wanted to stay this awake and alive, if I wanted to stay me, I would have to keep writing.
One of the best memoirs I've ever read.
I can't remember how I found this book, maybe a random review of some sort, but the cover kept my attention. It's a stroke of luck since I have never read any of the author's works, and most likely wouldn't have been interested in reading about his life. Something about this story of a boy, living a life I've never known, learning to defend himself and his friends, spoke out to me.
Andre Dubus grew up facing violence in the neighbourhoods he lived in, struggling to find a way to stop hiding from the hits he would be taking from the rougher kids. With his parents divorced, his mother was mainly preoccupied with putting food on the table. Andre being the oldest son meant looking out for his siblings, which he couldn't do until he got the motivation to work out, looking up to muscle men in magazines who had bodies that were enough to intimidate without actually using their fists. Along with this new regiment came confidence, and Andre found himself becoming someone who hungered for opportunities to physically punish wrongdoings, or any reason at all to use his punches to send messages. Strong messages. Eventually it wasn't hard to figure out that this lifestyle wouldn't last long.
Lingering beneath all this is the unconscious abandonment Andre feels from his father, who has gone on to live a new life without the rest of them, starting another family while he teaches at a college. The guilt that his father feels sometimes appears, but only simmers at the surface then wafts away. There's an urge to vent, to speak of all the problems he's had to handle on his own but that, like the guilt, passes. He finds that all the anger, the impulsiveness that he feels, can be slowly whittled away by writing. Words can help him, and it's oddly poetic because his father, the elder Andre Dubus, is also a writer.
I can't say enough about all the emotions this memoir made me feel. The sense of clarity...it's honest. I found myself hoping young Andre's courage to stand up to his bullies would finally come, to stop feeling resigned and expecting crushing blows to his body every day after school, something to just keep quiet about even after he made it home. I felt the satisfaction he described when he got into his first fight and his friends looked at him with a newfound sense of respect, even though I knew it would lead to more repercussions. I wanted him to burst at the seams and yell at his father, then feel guilty because I knew words were never that easily spoken. I felt.
Now that I've finished this memoir, it's probably time to read what else the author's written. Is it possible to top this?
One of the best memoirs I've ever read.
I can't remember how I found this book, maybe a random review of some sort, but the cover kept my attention. It's a stroke of luck since I have never read any of the author's works, and most likely wouldn't have been interested in reading about his life. Something about this story of a boy, living a life I've never known, learning to defend himself and his friends, spoke out to me.
Andre Dubus grew up facing violence in the neighbourhoods he lived in, struggling to find a way to stop hiding from the hits he would be taking from the rougher kids. With his parents divorced, his mother was mainly preoccupied with putting food on the table. Andre being the oldest son meant looking out for his siblings, which he couldn't do until he got the motivation to work out, looking up to muscle men in magazines who had bodies that were enough to intimidate without actually using their fists. Along with this new regiment came confidence, and Andre found himself becoming someone who hungered for opportunities to physically punish wrongdoings, or any reason at all to use his punches to send messages. Strong messages. Eventually it wasn't hard to figure out that this lifestyle wouldn't last long.
Lingering beneath all this is the unconscious abandonment Andre feels from his father, who has gone on to live a new life without the rest of them, starting another family while he teaches at a college. The guilt that his father feels sometimes appears, but only simmers at the surface then wafts away. There's an urge to vent, to speak of all the problems he's had to handle on his own but that, like the guilt, passes. He finds that all the anger, the impulsiveness that he feels, can be slowly whittled away by writing. Words can help him, and it's oddly poetic because his father, the elder Andre Dubus, is also a writer.
I can't say enough about all the emotions this memoir made me feel. The sense of clarity...it's honest. I found myself hoping young Andre's courage to stand up to his bullies would finally come, to stop feeling resigned and expecting crushing blows to his body every day after school, something to just keep quiet about even after he made it home. I felt the satisfaction he described when he got into his first fight and his friends looked at him with a newfound sense of respect, even though I knew it would lead to more repercussions. I wanted him to burst at the seams and yell at his father, then feel guilty because I knew words were never that easily spoken. I felt.
Now that I've finished this memoir, it's probably time to read what else the author's written. Is it possible to top this?
bgg616's review
4.0
I am a New Englander by roots and lived in Massachusetts for 20 years in Boston. I am Familiar with the old mill towns, and when I was young knew some guys from the kind of background the author writes about. In the middle of the book, I was getting a bit fed up with all of the fighting, but then the author started to pull out of that life style, and try to understand himself. By the end, I found it to be a pretty profound and satisfying read about fathers,sons, poverty, creativity (father and son are writers), and violence.