Hue explains the difficult process of coping with her husband Paul’s unexpected terminal illness in this debut memoir.
The author begins her book with a heartfelt dedication, immediately revealing that her husband did, in fact, lose his battle with cancer. This knowledge makes it both frustrating and admirable to watch Hue put her faith in the seemingly endless treatments, believing that her husband will get better and that their lives will return to normal. It all started with an ominous phone call, in which Paul, an Army translator, informed the author that he had to leave Iraq in order to get a proper medical examination of a lump on his neck. She frantically made a series of calls to loved ones as the reality of the situation set in, and she admitted that she didn’t want him to come home from Iraq under such circumstances. All the while, however, she remained calm for their young son, Tyler, and hopeful that things would work themselves out with God’s grace. Hue describes in straightforward detail the complexities of Paul’s diagnosis and treatment plan, even going so far as to include pages of transcribed conversations between Paul and his doctors. As the situation grows increasingly bleak, Hue’s voice remains composed, optimistic and informative. However, the memoir’s emotional quality is sometimes suppressed by the narration’s sterile tone, particularly in the first few chapters; some readers may find the long passages of clinical language detailing the treatment plans difficult to get through. However, when Hue digs deeper into the devastating details of her husband’s decline (“The nurses said that singing was his way of dealing with the pain, but it was getting harder and harder”), the memoir becomes incredibly moving. This book is particularly recommended for readers who have lost loved ones to cancer and who may be interested in the various coping methods that Hue employed.
An often touching memoir about the pain of loss and the strength one can find in true love.
Pub Date: June 17, 2014
ISBN: 978-1499188141
Page Count: 182
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: July 24, 2014
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
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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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