An honest exploration of the impact of international adoption on families and children alike.
A wry, forthright look at a Lincoln, Neb., family who embraced international adoption despite the daunting obstacles.
Eske was an only child when his parents gradually took on four more children from around the world. When the author was six, a nine-month-old girl from India, Meredith, came to live with them. The daughter of a 15-year-old dwarf, she had a maimed left leg and two attached fingertips. Several years later, two older Indian siblings were adopted—Michelle and Jordan, born to a desperately poor mother of the untouchable caste who begged for a living and prostituted her daughter. In 1996, another girl arrived, Yoo Jung, who was from South Korea and was diagnosed early with cerebral palsy. As Eske grew and went off to college, he began to regret how he had grown apart emotionally from his siblings, who each suffered ramifications from a traumatic birth. So the author decided to trek to India and South Korea to visit the orphanages from which his siblings came. In Pune, India, he found the Bharatiya Samaj Seva Kendra (BSSK) orphanage and learned how the rise of the Indian middle class has wrought positive change on domestic adoption. A similar situation was beginning to develop in South Korea, while North Korea was “living in what Charles Dickens would have labeled its ‘winter of despair.’ ” In an orphanage in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, Eske hoped to find other examples of the “belonging” he craved and missed. The author also considers how do-gooding can go terribly wrong, most recently in the cases of Zoe’s Ark, attempting to save children from Darfur in 2007, and the Baptist zealots from Idaho who tried to bring children from earthquake-ravaged Haiti in 2010. The narrative is a somewhat convoluted but sympathetic and engaging journey into emotional enlightenment.
An honest exploration of the impact of international adoption on families and children alike.Pub Date: Dec. 7, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-230-10415-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2010
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
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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
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