A religious debut memoir that carefully brings an engaging, complex family to life.
A pastor examines his childhood living with a disabled parent.
The author’s mother, Beverly “Bev” Mae Thornton, grew up in a modest family in Indiana. Warm, charismatic, and smart, she began, at age 16, to go out with John Thornton, a wealthier boy with a new Corvair. One night, they were in a terrible traffic accident, which would mark the rest of their lives with unanswered questions. Thornton, with co-author Kilpatrick, re-creates this time as if Thornton was actually there for his future mother’s painstaking recovery. She was left with limited motor skills and had violent mood swings that left her “groveling painfully on the floor” before her sisters. Racked with guilt, John slowly pushed his way back into her life and toward a shared future that perhaps they never really wanted, Thornton writes. All this carefully lays the groundwork for the story of his own experiences with his mother, primarily during his middle school years. He had a loving home life, but his mother’s disabilities also made it tumultuous, and he renders it all with the complexity it deserves. There are no easy answers to the difficulties surrounding disabilities, and Thornton and Kilpatrick reinforce that idea with each new story of embarrassment or, sometimes, terror. Well-balanced narration shows how the young Thornton slowly came to understand just how disheveled and odd their house was, particularly as his mother’s rage and erratic behavior intensified, he says, to include flying plates and threats with scissors. These moments are matched with equal instances of support, tenderness, and humor that help make Thornton’s home feel relatable; it also plays well into the narrative’s overall goal as a Christian testimony of faith. Although the author says that living with his mother brought constant surprises, he also writes, “It never struck me as strange that the woman holding scissors over us...was also my greatest example of what it means to live and love like Jesus.”
A religious debut memoir that carefully brings an engaging, complex family to life.Pub Date: July 5, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4964-1393-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Tyndale House
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2016
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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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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