A short memoir that makes for pleasant reading but doesn’t quite strike a balance between snark and Christian optimism.
Lloyd (These Boots Are Made for Butt-Kickin’, 2015, etc.) tells how a tragedy kindled a deeper trust in God.
The author’s first son, Caswell, was stillborn, but she still had to endure a long, difficult labor—including an epidural and having her water manually broken. “This is stupid,” she says, in the jolting opening of this book. “This is stinkin’ 2012 and they haven’t figured out a way to get my dead baby out of my body without making me come to the labor and delivery ward.” Lloyd repeatedly cycles back to the circumstances of the delivery in between memories of her Oklahoma upbringing and of her husband, a fellow attorney, whom she met in Geneva, Switzerland. Her sarcastic, slang-filled Southern drawl pervades the first third of the text, with Lloyd announcing to “future pregnant friends,” “Don’t expect me to come to your baby showers” and labeling herself a “card-carrying member of the suck-it-up club.” The title chapter, however, shifts in tone to note how frequently the Bible mentions joy, and it feels sudden and forced. “Sure, I hearted Jesus,” Lloyd recalls, but Caswell’s stillbirth provoked a make-or-break situation: to survive, she realized that she had to develop a solid faith. Although she later became a mother of two, she learned that stillbirth and miscarriage were surprisingly common in her circle. Indeed, the primary worth of this memoir may be in reassuring readers with similar stories that they’re not alone and that transparency is the best policy: “those children exist. And they need to be acknowledged,” she says at one point. At another, she says, “People can deal. Or not.” Overall, the one- to five-page chapters sometimes resemble blog entries rather than a polished book, and a note of false cheer lingers throughout that detracts somewhat from the tragedy that prompted the writing. However, the chatty, between-girlfriends style (including such phrases as “Oh no she di-int,” “cray-cray,” and multiple hashtags) will appeal to fans of popular Christian writers such as Jen Hatmaker and Patsy Clairmont.
A short memoir that makes for pleasant reading but doesn’t quite strike a balance between snark and Christian optimism.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2015
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 153
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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