A welcome guide for new grandparents and their children looking to savor the joys and navigate the pitfalls of...
Award-winning broadcast journalist Stahl (Reporting Live, 1999) shares the joys of being a grandmother.
The author began her career reporting on Watergate and has been a top correspondent for 60 Minutes for the past 25 years. Fortunately, her husband, author and screenwriter Aaron Latham, was able to assume a significant share of the responsibility for their only child, Taylor, leaving Stahl free to pursue her demanding career. In 2011, with the birth of her first grandchild, Jordan, she “was jolted, blindsided by a wall of loving more intense than anything I could remember or had ever imagined.” As someone who has covered suicide bombings in Israel and walked the streets of New York City on 9/11, she had considered herself to be unflappable. She experienced what she describes as an infatuation. Startled, she decided to investigate the importance of the role grandparents can play in the lives of their children and grandchildren. They often help financially, of course, and frequently step in as babysitters or even nannies to ease the burden on parents who are both working. “One in ten American children lives with a grandparent,” writes Stahl, “and a third of them count on their grandparents as their primary caretakers.” For the majority of grandparents, the responsibility is a sought-after joy rather than a burden, and grandparenting often provides a new lease on life for empty nesters. However, in cases of poverty, this may not be the case, especially when grandparents are called upon to assume full parenting and financial responsibilities. For Stahl, it was a second chance to experience the joys of parenting, but she had to continually remind herself not to criticize or give unwanted advice. Through the medium of her own experiences, the author delivers a wise and witty book.
A welcome guide for new grandparents and their children looking to savor the joys and navigate the pitfalls of grandparenting.Pub Date: April 12, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-399-16815-4
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Blue Rider Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
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
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