Absorbing, instructive testimony from a “lucky” Katrina evacuee/returnee.
A New Orleans–based nurse educator shares the challenges that she and her family faced following Hurricane Katrina.
Like many, Karlin, a nurse educator, and her surgeon husband, Rich, didn’t evacuate their New Orleans home in advance of Katrina until mandated. With two kids and two dogs in tow, they drove toward Houston, hit standstill traffic, aimed next for Florida, and landed in a Mississippi motel that a friend had wisely booked. Riding out the storm there, with flooding, power outages, and scant food, they then made their way to Houston, helping to rescue a man in a horrible car accident en route and getting strange looks due to their bedraggled state, which included Rich’s black eye (inflicted by their anxious dog). Karlin secured an apartment in Houston, and her children attended an overcrowded school. Her husband returned to New Orleans to provide “C-team” medical relief. While the Karlin home wasn’t terribly damaged, the general devastation forced Karlin’s husband to take another surgery gig outside of the city to pay the bills. Karlin had to flee Houston during Hurricane Rita and New Orleans again for Hurricane Gustav and became adept at emergency preparedness. She concludes with an epilogue detailing how her family is now thriving and includes snapshots of the “misery tour” they took of New Orleans and surrounding areas shortly after Katrina. She celebrates NOLA spirit and the heartwarming charity she experienced, which prompted her own outreach following Hurricane Sandy. While the hardships that Karlin details pale in comparison to the horrors that others in New Orleans endured, she provides an important record of how even seemingly privileged lives were upended by this natural catastrophe. “It’s hard to imagine that surgeons needed to work two jobs in order to recover from Katrina,” Karlin writes. Her first-person narrative, a series of dated journal entries, is by turns heartbreaking (she found a “crying spot” at their shelter motel) and amusing (her multiple evacuations were “like the whack-a-mole game at Chuck E. Cheese’s”) and also includes helpful tips.
Absorbing, instructive testimony from a “lucky” Katrina evacuee/returnee.Pub Date: July 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9962327-0-8
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Centennial
Review Posted Online: July 30, 2015
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
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
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
