A graceful, perceptive rendering of a misunderstood condition.
A child born with albinism inspires a concerned mother to uncover its genetic origins.
Canadian folklorist Urquhart’s affecting debut memoir centers around Sadie, born in 2010 with a rare skin pigmentation disorder resulting in an ethereal whiteness of the skin, hair and eyes, along with a host of maladies including photophobia and partial blindness. Together with compassionate input from her biologist husband, Urquhart presents a creative interpretation of her journey through folkloric beliefs and fables to obtain a new understanding and valuing of Sadie’s condition, whether through a new ophthalmologist or the family’s move to western Canada. As Sadie progressed through her first year, the author immersed herself in noncompetitive support groups, chatted with artistic acquaintances and networked at an international albinism conference populated by parents accompanying their albino children with “the inaudible swish of white canes sweeping side to side across the floor.” From more seasoned parents, Urquhart gleaned the heartbreaking reality of bullying and peer exclusion due to an albino child’s appearance and limited vision, while others offered encouragement to simply embrace their imperfections and abnormalities. Though she met hopeful test subjects for new pigmentation drug trials and briefly explored issues of genetic screening, darker chapters detail an unsettling voyage to Tanzania, where albinism can spur eerie, witchcraft-inspired atrocities. Throughout her three-year odyssey, Urquhart voraciously digested familial, archival and census material, searching out medical specialists and “tangential ancestors” in hopes of unraveling the biological nature of Sadie’s condition. A weathered photograph album renewed interest in her paternal family tree, which led to a relative who personified a “twist in my genetic lineage.” Throughout, the author remains intensely focused on comprehending the complexities of hereditary genetics while appreciating her daughter’s “unusual beauty.”
A graceful, perceptive rendering of a misunderstood condition.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-238916-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Harper Avenue
Review Posted Online: Jan. 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2015
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 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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