An expansive, uneven work that would benefit from a narrower focus.
Through the character of Karla, debut author Mayer chronicles her life, from a traumatic childhood in Austria through her retirement from successful psychiatry practice in the United States.
Part autobiography, part call to arms for childhood sex abuse victims and part exploration of Eastern healing, Mayer tells her story through the eyes of Karla, who, along the way, is sexually assaulted by multiple adult male perpetrators, with little support or empathy from the adults in her life. She’s briefly left behind with an aunt and uncle and then kidnapped, though somewhat willingly, by her mother. Her turbulent childhood continues through her mother’s remarriage, strained relationships with siblings, the challenges of immigration and the concealment of an explosive family secret. In adulthood, Karla settles into medicine, marriage and maternity while facing both personal and professional challenges. The fast-paced plot includes unplanned pregnancies greeted with joy or consternation, sudden deaths, protracted illnesses, abortions and marital strife. The variety of events heightens interest, but the somewhat stilted writing style can detract from reading pleasure (e.g., “Still, she had no doubt that all the craziness in her family influenced her interest in psychiatry, where these aberrations are studied in an educated manner”). Similarly, Mayer presents an unabashedly one-sided view that can come across as Pollyannaish: “As Karla thought about her mother as an innocent young girl, loyal to her family, not fearing work, and ambitious, she pictured her as being open to the world and not prepared for all the deceit in it. Her heart felt a thrill at what a wonderful young woman her mother had been.” Despite these shortcomings, though, the autobiographical portions of the book are likely to have broad appeal. Also, much of the Eastern philosophy will be interesting to readers regardless of their personal beliefs, although some of Mayer’s assertions (she claims to be the reincarnation of Genghis Khan’s mother, and her husband is the reincarnation of Khan himself) will strain believability for many readers.
An expansive, uneven work that would benefit from a narrower focus.Pub Date: Aug. 9, 2011
ISBN: 978-1463442897
Page Count: 262
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: April 24, 2013
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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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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