A personal, heart-rending story of struggle and anguish in the face of unconditional love.
Following the untimely death of his adopted African-American son, a father seeks posthumous reconciliation in this affecting collection of personal letters by Gough.
Jeff and his fraternal twin, Shelia, were 7 years old when they were adopted. The author and his wife, Judy, spotted the photographs of “two black kids available for adoption” in the local newspaper. At the end of the 1960s, attitudes toward racial integration in America were changing, marked by the repeal of anti-miscegenation laws, yet racial tensions remained high in many states. The author, who describes himself as living a “white Anglo-Saxon lifestyle,” was all too aware of having spent the summer of 1965 working as a civil rights volunteer in Mississippi. Each of the letters in this book is addressed to deceased Jeff, gently explaining the background to his adoption into a white family. Jeff is described as a charismatic yet defiant child; his actions, in part, related to him being physically and emotionally abused during the first six years of his life. He remained naturally defensive, twisting away from his adoptive father’s embrace. As he grew older, he began to steal, beginning with what seemed an innocuous piggy bank heist but in later years turning into car burglaries, joyriding, and petty theft. Evidently beyond his father’s physical control and emotional guidance, Jeff’s life rapidly spiraled downward, and as a young man he spent time between the YMCA and jail, heading toward a tragic end. The author’s stylistic approach is admirably succinct and frank: “you came into our family as a child who had learned to take because nothing was given.” The book may fail to fully reflect the emotional viewpoints of Jeff’s sister or his adoptive siblings, who remain muted throughout, yet that’s excusable given how this is essentially a monologue from father to son. While more broadly exploring the bonds and strains of interracial adoptive parenthood, the brave, cathartic writing also offers a window to street-level racial tensions during the civil rights movement.
A personal, heart-rending story of struggle and anguish in the face of unconditional love.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5033-0437-6
Page Count: 204
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 14, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
PERSPECTIVES
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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BOOK REVIEW
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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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