A tender, Christian-based memoir of love and friendship.
One young woman's struggle with her faith.
As Luce discovered, being the daughter of the well-known youth evangelist and co-founder of Teen Mania Ministries, Ron Luce, was no small task, especially as she grew into her teens and began to question her faith in God. With the help of Fisher (Narrative Journalism/Rutgers Univ.; co-author: The Woman Who Wasn't There: The True Story of an Incredible Deception, 2012, etc.), Luce delves into the complex world of personal faith, of growing up hearing one strict version of the Bible while feeling and believing that other variations of Christianity were possible, versions that tolerated same-sex marriage, drinking alcohol and the right to question religious texts. Although she dearly loved her father and enjoyed their long talks on car rides and mission trips, she didn’t always support his rhetoric. "Papa had come to his own conclusions about God and the church, and I was forming my own,” she writes. “We didn’t have to agree. However it all shook out I would respect Papa's beliefs, and I hoped that he would respect me for searching so long and hard to find mine." Confused and conflicted, Luce relied on her two best friends, Austin and Garrett, for emotional, physical and spiritual support. Then her world was devastated when the small plane she was traveling in with these two friends and two others crashed, killing everyone onboard except Luce. What followed was physical trauma as well as the extreme guilt and anguish she felt at being the sole survivor. After months of recovery, Luce discovered the answers to the questions for which she had been searching for so long.
A tender, Christian-based memoir of love and friendship.Pub Date: Oct. 22, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4767-2960-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: Sept. 20, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2013
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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