Readers familiar with cancer or with terminal illness in general will find a source of comfort and meaning in Pausch’s...
A touching memoir of grief.
The author is the widow of Randy Pausch, who wrote the bestseller The Last Lecture and died of pancreatic cancer in 2008. Far from being a mere add-on to her late husband’s book, this work stands on its own as an eloquent testimony of a caregiver. Pausch begins by recounting the beginnings of her relationship with her husband, a promising professor at Carnegie Mellon, while she was finishing a doctorate at the University of North Carolina. They married, started a family and were living a normal life when Randy was diagnosed with cancer. Despite surgery and chemotherapy, the cancer recurred, and his case was deemed terminal. The Last Lecture made Randy’s final months unusual, but the publication of the book and the activity regarding it are largely in the background of the overall story. With her husband’s death, the author was left to parent three young children and to find new direction in her life while in her early 40s. Pausch does an admirable job of narrating the story of her husband’s illness, death and its aftermath, keeping the reader continually engaged and drawn into her world. Most notably, Pausch manages to share her pain and heartache at an intensely personal level without ever sounding self-absorbed or asking for the reader’s pity. She makes it clear that her years of marriage and family life overshadow even the pain of losing her husband, and as the book closes, she focuses on the importance of rebuilding her life and, as she puts it, dreaming new dreams.
Readers familiar with cancer or with terminal illness in general will find a source of comfort and meaning in Pausch’s story, while others will take away a lesson in how people can endure in the face of anxiety and grief.Pub Date: May 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-307-88850-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: April 3, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
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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