A wise and elegiac tribute to a mother, a writer, and a brave spirit, from a loving but clear-eyed daughter.
A moving but frank account of the last year of Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s life, by her daughter, that poignantly details an often difficult relationship between a loving parent and her now-adult child.
Like all journals, this is as much a record of emotions as events. Lindbergh (Under a Wing, 1998, etc.) begins with the summer of 1999 when it was apparent that 93-year-old Anne Morrow Lindbergh, ill with pneumonia, was too frail to live in her own home in Connecticut, and needed to move to her cottage on her daughter’s Vermont farm. Around-the-clock caregivers keep her comfortable and relieve the author of much of the physical burden, but she still must contend with the slow dying of all that her mother was, and meant, an emotional weight almost as wearing in its reality and its implications. Her mother, whose great gift was her ability to use language, now seldom spoke. She read a great deal, often seemed restless, and talked of wanting to go home, but could not define, after a lifetime of living in many places, what particular home she meant. The author notes the guilt all children feel as their parents age, not because, “we have not done our best for them but because we have. We cannot keep them alive . . . there is nothing we can do about it.” As she records her reactions and her mother’s continuing decline, she also recalls her childhood, her famous father, and her relations with her siblings and her own children. But at the heart of her journal is the relationship with her mother, who so comforted her when her first son died young, and who shared her delight in writing. Despite her failing health and her retreat into almost total silence, Anne Morrow lingered until February of this year.
A wise and elegiac tribute to a mother, a writer, and a brave spirit, from a loving but clear-eyed daughter.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2001
ISBN: 0-7432-0313-5
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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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