An absorbing, revealing work of startling frankness.
A father’s candid, heart-wrenching account of raising, loving and trying to connect with and gain insight into his severely disabled son.
A journalist for The Globe and Mail, Brown wrote a series of pieces about his son Walker for the newspaper in 2007. The book, a multiple-award winner in Canada when it was first published in 2009, is largely based on those pieces, which in turn had their beginnings in a journal the author had kept. Brown’s son Walker was born with cardiofaciocutaneous (CFC) syndrome, an extremely rare genetic disorder affecting only a few hundred children around the world. The author writes of the struggle to raise a self-destructive child who could not speak and suffered numerous physical deformities and medical problems, recounting in sometimes harsh detail the onerous daily routine of caring for the boy and the strains this put on his marriage. However, this is much more than a moving journal of life with a disabled child; it is about Brown’s quest to understand his son and his son’s condition. He seeks out and profiles other families with CFC children, interviews a genetic researcher who found mutations in three genes related to the disorder, looks for clues to CFC through an MRI of Walker’s brain and travels to France to visit L’Arche, a faith-based organization that operates communities for the developmentally disabled. Brown’s story of the frustrations of trying to do the best for his child and find a safe place for him in a world uncomfortable with people with disabilities reveals the failures of society to establish a coherent system to help the families of disabled children. After years of at-home care, the author found a satisfactory group home for Walker, now 13, where he appears to be thriving.
An absorbing, revealing work of startling frankness.Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-67183-9
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 20, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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