A perceptive chronicle of hard-won wisdom.
A candid memoir of love, illness, and friendship and a justification for “romantic feminist love.”
Brill (co-author: Dancing at the River’s Edge: A Patient and Her Doctor Negotiate Life with Chronic Illness, 2009, etc.) reveals her struggle for independence in the face of social expectations and a debilitating autoimmune disease. Growing up in the 1950s, Brill was repeatedly misdiagnosed by unsympathetic, sexist doctors; one suggested that her symptoms of stiffness, swelling, and fevers were psychosomatic. Finally, she was diagnosed with atypical juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, which was revised as systemic lupus; she was 30 before a physician—and co-author of her last memoir—discovered she had the chronic, incurable, atypical Wegener’s granulomatosis. Brill reflects on how her health affected her aspirations and marriages. Years after her first husband divorced her, he confessed that he had left because of her disease. “He had needed to preserve the quality of his life and ensure his future,” he explained. Her second husband, a self-aggrandizing liar whom one neurologist diagnosed as a narcissistic sociopath, resented it when her illness flared up. Two bad choices, though, have not dissuaded Brill from believing in love: not the happily-ever-after story that she had imagined, as a star-struck child, for Grace Kelly but “love in mutually understanding and accepting ways.” Brill’s feminism was honed, in part, through her long friendship with Betty Friedan, whose groundbreaking The Feminine Mystique had hugely influenced Brill’s mother. As “a pioneering cartographer for women,” Friedan was judgmental and bad-tempered, with a voracious craving for praise and recognition. She denigrated Gloria Steinem for garnering the attention that she thought was her due. But she and Brill bonded over chronic illness—Friedan’s was asthma—and shared ideals for women’s lives.
A perceptive chronicle of hard-won wisdom.Pub Date: April 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-936182-84-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Schaffner Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
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
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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