An unsentimental yet wholly moving memoir.
A high school Spanish teacher’s memoir about a peripatetic, often turbulent childhood and adolescence spent among fundamentalist Mormons.
Wariner, her “mother’s fourth child and her father’s thirty-ninth,” grew up in the small fundamentalist Mormon colony of LeBaron in northern Mexico. Chaos dominated her early life: one of her eldest siblings was prone to fits of extreme aggression, and when the author was 3 months old, her father was murdered. By the time she was 3, her mother, Kathy, had become the second wife of another colonist named Lane. But rather than bring stability to the family, the marriage only seemed to exacerbate the chaos. Lane and her mother argued and fought, sometimes violently. And while Kathy tried to sever the relationship by leaving LeBaron, she always found herself going back to her husband and bearing more children, whom she supported with government welfare checks. Wariner’s own relationship to her parents grew increasingly strained as she became older. In elementary school, Lane began to sexually abuse her. The author told Kathy about the abuse, but it continued into her teenage years. Desperate for “attention and adoration” from Lane, Kathy told her daughter she should “be more Christlike” and forgive her stepfather for his trespasses so as to keep the family together. After a freak accident that killed both Kathy and one of her younger siblings, Wariner discovered that Lane was also abusing her younger, developmentally delayed brother, Luke. With the help of another brother, who had gone to California to make a life for himself, 16-year-old Wariner took her remaining siblings to the United States, where she raised her three youngest sisters on her own. Engrossingly readable from start to finish, the book not only offers a riveting portrayal of life in a polygamist community. It also celebrates the powerful bond between siblings determined to not only survive their circumstances, but also thrive in spite of them.
An unsentimental yet wholly moving memoir.Pub Date: Jan. 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-250-07769-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Sept. 23, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2015
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
