by Chris Forhan ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 28, 2016
It’s difficult to lose a parent, let alone write about the loss. Forhan describes his family’s healing and acceptance with...
An award-winning poet revisits the suicide of his father.
Forhan (English/Butler Univ.; Ransack and Dance, 2013, etc.) was 14 when his middle-age father, Ed, the head of finance for Alaska Lumber and Pulp, went into the carport of the family’s home, ran a garden hose from the exhaust pipe of his car to the driver’s window, and lay down across the front seat. The author’s mother, Ange, discovered her husband the next morning. Forty years later, when Forhan reached the age at which his father died, he realized that his father is only “a scattering of fragments.” So he decided to track down anyone who could help him understand why Ed would have chosen, without a word of warning, to abandon his wife and eight children. The resulting memoir is a poignant exploration of Ed’s strict Catholic upbringing, his problems with diabetes, and, once he became a father, his increasingly erratic behavior—slipping up at work, staying out all night, incurring gambling debts. The book also charts Forhan’s maturity, from his years as a Boy Scout to his early TV news career and growing doubts about Catholicism. The book’s main flaw is that Ed often isn’t at the center of the story and thus feels at times like a supporting player. These absences, coupled with long digressions on more mundane events—such as the free koi Forhan received from a radio station or the tourist sites his family visited on a trip to Disneyland—dilute the book’s power. But there are still many affecting scenes here, especially of the author finding solace in poetry and his discovery that a poem can communicate “a sense of openness, of receptive attention to a life that enchants and baffles.”
It’s difficult to lose a parent, let alone write about the loss. Forhan describes his family’s healing and acceptance with warmth, humor, and an admirable lack of bitterness.Pub Date: June 28, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-3126-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 27, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
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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 ; illustrated by Mark Podwal
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by Elie Wiesel ; translated by Marion Wiesel
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