A candid account of personal devastation and renewal.
In her debut memoir, Freed, a Mississippi coastal resident, recounts the sudden breakup of her marriage on the eve of Hurricane Katrina.
Having recently returned from a pleasant trip to Miami to visit her military surgeon husband, Conner, Freed was shocked to receive an email from him suggesting the two of them ought to divorce. Conner suggested that if they were to move forward, he would like Freed, a successful math professor, to undergo breast enlargement and commit to sex at least once a day. Aware that Conner was under a lot of pressure and was a high-functioning alcoholic, Freed tried unsuccessfully to reason with him. With Hurricane Katrina expected to make landfall at any time, Freed tried to come to grips with their failed relationship, even while evacuating her coastal home with her toddler-aged daughter, Genoa. After waiting out the storm on safer ground with a neighboring couple, Freed returned to find her house and the area she called home decimated. Still reeling from the sense that she had been married to a man she didn’t know, and with no home to return to, Freed had to hit the ground running—dealing with FEMA, insurance adjustors, divorce attorneys, even a private detective she employed to shadow her husband in Miami. With the help of friends and family, Freed was able to put her life back together and face the future on her own terms as an academic and single mother. Freed’s prose is often gorgeous and surprising, as when, amid the chaos and destruction, she writes: “The air tasted delicious. I swallowed and felt her deep inside me, filling me up. She was full of energy. We were explorers in her world. She led us. The ominous excitement, frightening and invigorating, teased us forward…we were respectful and vigilant. We knew we were not in charge.” While the memoir certainly succeeds at the personal, confessional level, the sporadic attempts at broader social commentary can be rather nearsighted. It’s difficult not to balk, for instance, when white, affluent Freed relates a brief shared moment at Wal-Mart with “Another mother, obese, with gold and missing teeth, and two children in worn clothes,” prompting Freed’s observation of how “wonderfully equalizing” Katrina was.
A candid account of personal devastation and renewal.Pub Date: April 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499184358
Page Count: 196
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: May 28, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
