An unquestionably heroic narrative that never sounds preening or self-satisfied.
Poet Serotte turns to prose to recreate her childhood as a Sephardic Jew in post-WWII New York.
Her memoir is filled with the requisite ethnic eccentricities, from hovering aunts to mouth-watering exotic foods. What transforms this from a predictable child-of-immigrants-coming-of-age saga is the author’s struggle with polio. Her carefree girlhood came to an abrupt halt in September 1954, when she collapsed one evening next to her mother’s mah-jongg table. Rushed to a hospital, seven-year-old Brenda learned that she was better off than some: She hadn’t contracted bulbar polio, a fate that would have consigned her to an iron lung. The polio ward she called home for several months housed some bulbar patients, and staff and patients alike were always listening carefully for the click of their tongues, the only way they could communicate if something went wrong—if, for example, their iron lung stopped working. Serotte brilliantly recreates the sheer dread the very word “polio” evoked in those pre–Jonas Salk days. Her description of her family’s response to her illness is unflinching. Her father doted without coddling, but her mother was barely able to cope. An emotionally withdrawn woman to begin with, she could not stand the fact that her lovely daughter would forever be crippled; her grief and shame culminated in an unsuccessful suicide attempt. During her long hospital convalescence, Brenda was forced to find a surrogate mother in Mrs. Cook, whose daughter also had polio. Throughout her ordeal, Serotte was terrifically brave, determined not only to live, but to learn how to walk before her cousin’s wedding in December.
An unquestionably heroic narrative that never sounds preening or self-satisfied.Pub Date: March 20, 2006
ISBN: 0-8032-4326-X
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Univ. of Nebraska
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2006
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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