by Charlotte Pierce-Baker ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2012
An African-American mother’s frank account of coping with an adult son with bipolar disorder.
Pierce-Baker (Women's and Gender Studies/Vanderbilt Univ.; Surviving the Silence: Black Women's Stories of Rape, 1998), who acknowledges that she was naïve about her son Mark’s teenage behavioral issues, received a brutal education in bipolar disorder when he was in his 20s. At age 23 he went completely and frighteningly out of control on a family trip. She and her husband were disturbed by his rage and later by his evasions and constant requests for money, but they had no idea he was suffering from mental illness or that he had been self-medicating with drugs and alcohol. When he became paranoid, insisting that extraterrestrials were watching him, they arranged for a psychiatric evaluation. He received a diagnosis of bipolar disorder, and from then on his life took a steep downward turn. He dropped out of graduate school, his young marriage fell apart and his psychotic rages landed him in jail more than once. To tell her son’s story, Pierce-Baker draws on her own journal of that time, on what she learned from her research and, most surprisingly, on her son’s writings, including his poetry. It is a disheartening tale of trying to maintain contact with Mark, of bailing him out of jail and of searching desperately for treatment centers that would accept him. A stay at a center offering a 12-step program for alcoholics was a bad match, but he tried another center, worked seriously at rehabilitation and met the woman he would marry. A happy ending is not on offer, however, for Pierce-Baker is realistic about her son’s needs and his chances of a fulfilling life. A dark narrative brightened by a devoted mother’s commitment and resilience in the face of an only child’s strange and terrible illness.
Pub Date: June 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61374-108-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Lawrence Hill Books/Chicago Review
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ; illustrated by Jackie Aher
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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by Elie Wiesel ; edited by Alan Rosen
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by Elie Wiesel ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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