A delectably warm and wise memoir.
An award-winning novelist tells the deliciously candid story of her unconventional path to motherhood.
Abu-Jaber (Birds of Paradise, 2011, etc.) grew up between the polarities of two strong personalities: that of her Arab father, Bud, on the one hand, and her maternal grandmother, Grace, on the other. Adversaries who also happened to agree on many things, they fought for the author’s attention through food: where Bud delighted with his spicy meat dishes, Grace tempted with her divine cakes and cookies. The struggle also centered around their desires for Abu-Jaber's life, with Bud demanding that she wed as soon as she was old enough and her grandmother warning that romance was “lie” and marriage and babies were “for women who [couldn’t] do much else.” Abu-Jaber, however, was determined to create her own life recipe, which proved harder than she imagined. Straight out of college, she married a man who was more convenience than lover and whom she divorced less than a year later. Secretly enchanted by “the idea of marriage,” she wed again in graduate school, this time to an intellectual for whom she felt no passion. In the midst of personal turmoil, her career thrived, but it wasn’t until her mid-30s that she finally settled into a relationship that satisfied her desires rather than those instilled by Bud and Grace. A decade later, Abu-Jaber suddenly found herself wanting to adopt a child, whom she named in honor of the woman who warned her against motherhood. Strong-willed yet tender, Gracie not only taught the author lessons in patience, giving, and self-acceptance. She also became the unexpected apple of Bud’s baby boy–coveting eye and the missing ingredient in an intergenerational recipe for family harmony. Generously seasoned by an abiding love of food and a keen eye for the nuances of human relationships, this book is a reminder that however unpredictable it may be, life is a dish to be savored.
A delectably warm and wise memoir.Pub Date: April 18, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-393-24909-5
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 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
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BOOK REVIEW
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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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