The author’s custody battle highlights the oppression of divorced fathers in this rancorous memoir.
Wesley Weiss, hero of this slightly fictionalized account of the author’s hideous mid-1980s divorce and its aftermath, finds himself in a war for the hearts and presence of his three young daughters. His adversary is his ex, “Dea,” whose vengefulness approaches that of her mythic namesake. The main front is Dea’s efforts to curtail Wes’ access to their kids through tactics manifold and devious—sudden changes in visitation schedules, frosty hand-overs that make every outing between father and daughters feel like a prisoner exchange at the Berlin Wall, the cutting off of phone and mail contact, false charges of child abuse over a skinned knee. Every detail of Wes’ paternal doings is governed by fraught (and often eye-glazing) negotiations and judicial proceedings supervised by expensive lawyers and court-appointed therapists. Worst of all is the “parental alienation” caused by Dea’s poisoning of the kids’ feelings toward Wes; every estranged dad will feel a pang of recognition at his awkward relationship with his once-loving daughters, who grow so sullen, aloof and militantly resistant to his overtures that bystanders mistake him for a predator stalking them. The author, a psychology professor and fathers’-rights activist, hangs on this narrative a lengthy indictment of Wisconsin divorce law and society’s disparagement of the male parental role. (In a subplot, Wes launches a second custody battle when he is misled by a married woman’s promises into begetting a son.) There’s a palpable bitterness at what Wiederholt perceives as female deceit and manipulation, feminism’s double standards and bias in the legal system. Wes resents wives who expect husbands to support them financially and girlfriends who want boyfriends to pay for dates; he takes to filing spiteful nuisance motions and gloats when a judge dies of cancer. The reader senses that there may be another side to the story that isn’t coming through. Still, Wiederholt crafts a moving evocation of a divorced father’s feelings of anguish and ostracism. A vivid, if one-sided, saga of familial disaffection and twisted justice.
Pub Date: Aug. 31, 2011
ISBN: 978-1461198314
Page Count: 244
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Dec. 8, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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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