Moving for all the right reasons.
A posthumously published account of the 21-year-old cystic fibrosis sufferer’s decision to undergo a lung transplant offers a memorable testament to her resilient spirit.
This finely wrought chronicle about choosing to live to the full in the face of death admirably balances the author’s fears and hopes. NPR Radio Diaries contributor Rothenberg is neither mawkishly self-pitying nor unrealistically optimistic as she reviews her life and the choices she faces. After she was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis and underwent surgery when she was three days old, she experienced countless operations, hospital stays, and ER visits. She saw fellow sufferers die young, and had no illusions about the disease; statistically, her midlife expectancy was 28. But at 19, the year the memoir begins, she is contemplating a lung transplant. A student at Brown, she swims, loves writing, and has numerous friends, but, as she notes, “here I am at college, and I can’t write about the future.” Her pancreas doesn’t function, she must take insulin, her lungs are congested, and she can’t have children. She’d be happy to have vacations that didn’t involve hospitalizations. As she mulls over whether she should undergo the 12-hour operation that will deter the disease’s progression, she admits fearing that it won’t work. Once decided on surgery, she writes in diary entries and e-mails about her feelings, activities, friends, and family as she waits for a suitable tissue match. The operation in July 2001 is brutal, and so is her recovery; she suffers bowel obstructions, pneumonia, and lymphoma as her body rejects the lungs. But despite the hospital stays, Rothenberg sees friends, goes back briefly to Brown, and is determined not to let “my health rule my life.” An epilogue written shortly before her death in March 2003 acknowledges that she’s experiencing acute rejection, and doesn’t know whether it is easier to live or die.
Moving for all the right reasons.Pub Date: July 9, 2003
ISBN: 1-4013-0059-6
Page Count: 240
Publisher: Hyperion
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2003
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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