The author’s sincere, undeniably encouraging account of his communications with the dead.
Ruetz’s debut is an autobiographical account of finding the strength to deal with the loss of his wife and two sons in a plane crash over Costa Rican waters.
Retired police officer Ruetz was living with his wife, Cynthia, and young sons, Justin and Jack, in Costa Rica. In July 2005, his family, as well as his friend Paul and Paul’s son, Connor, died while taking an air tour in a light plane. Ruetz was devastated but believed that his family was communicating with him from “the Other Side.” In this, he found hope, and after consulting a medium, he recognized what he saw as signs or messages, like the repeated appearances of yellow-breasted birds, representing his wife and boys. Ruetz’s personal tale is often endearing, particularly when he talks about Cynthia and his sons. Learning the boys’ traits—Justin’s diagnosis of Asperger syndrome and Jack’s accident-prone behavior—makes them even more tangible. Ruetz, however, spends a good deal of the book discussing his connection with “Spirit,” what he calls his family’s messages from the afterlife, and what may have been premonitions prior to the accident; e.g., his intense fear of flying in small planes or a sudden feeling while at a store that his sons would die in the near future. Appendices at the book’s end, which catalog signs and ways in which Spirit has “guided” him (before and after the accident), are largely unconvincing: messages about a stuck gate or an expired Costco membership card are neither practical nor life-altering. And references to a specific medium come across as veiled advertisements, complete with the medium’s Web address. But even if the novel doesn’t sway skeptics, it’s an inspiring account of a husband and father coping with tragedy. Ruetz felt guilty after the plane crash for not warning his family of what he should have realized were foreboding signs, but later, the former cop clarifies his guilt in a much more discernible way—an inability to protect his wife and sons. Likewise, his apparent spirit communication brings Ruetz peace, which ultimately leads him to help others by opening a school in Costa Rica.
The author’s sincere, undeniably encouraging account of his communications with the dead.Pub Date: July 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1500222987
Page Count: 176
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Aug. 26, 2014
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
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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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