Curiously unsatisfying, particularly in asides involving the author (as when she likens a career in venture capitalism to...
A mother-and-daughter collaboration employing poetry reveals how “the impenetrable walls of autism” are breached.
Interspersing memories and photos with heartfelt pride in her daughter, Breen presents Elizabeth’s poetry throughout this chronicle of finding relative peace amid countless challenges. While the poems do not differ markedly from those penned by many teens, the fact that they represent missives from an otherwise silent, autistic individual forms a locus for the author. She offers them as evidence of Elizabeth’s capacity for expression and spirituality despite being “prison-pent in her silent cage,” and as an encouragement that poetry “opens a heavenly door.” Some readers may bristle at the general portrayal of autism as a “burden” to “conquer” and at her comparison of parenting struggles to 9/11; Breen also emerges as a controversial proponent of autism as a form of suffering rather than as another modality for being. Her hope that “God or medical science, or a combination” will provide healing is best suited for a primarily Christian readership with similar beliefs.
Curiously unsatisfying, particularly in asides involving the author (as when she likens a career in venture capitalism to autism, and relates tales of a Tibetan excursion), the book is redeemed by the acknowledgment of the patience, dedication, love and listening required between every parent and child.Pub Date: Oct. 15, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-8007-2071-1
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Revell
Review Posted Online: Sept. 15, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
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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