Courageous and important but emotionally overdone.
An attorney and former journalist tells the dramatic story of her five-year undercover lesbian relationship with former Illinois Sen. Penny Severns.
When 27-year-old AP reporter Mutchler first saw 41-year-old Penny at the Illinois state capitol in April 1993, a “jolt of electricity passed through [her].” She knew nothing about the senator, including her sexual orientation. Fully aware of the risks involved in seeking out a personal relationship with a high-profile journalistic contact, Mutchler pursued Severns, and the two began a friendship that quickly turned into a passionate relationship. From the start, both women knew that their involvement was problematic—not only due to who they were professionally, but also sexually. Living and loving in secret, they developed complex, often exhausting ruses to hide the true nature of their relationship from all but a few people. Less than a year into their involvement, their situation became even more complicated when Severns was diagnosed with the cancer that would eventually take her life in 1998. Profoundly anguished, Mutchler watched the beautiful, vibrant woman she considered her spouse decline into helplessness, all too aware that “legally, [she] was nothing.” The situation only worsened after her partner’s death, when the senator’s sister and homophobic father distanced themselves from Mutchler and claimed the bulk of the senator’s estate—part of which Severns had acquired with the young reporter—for the Severns family alone. The author dwells too frequently and unrestrainedly on the pain and rage of her loss so that the narrative sometimes reads like grief therapy. Still, her book makes a moving case for why the fight for marriage equality must continue. “Somewhere inside my own being,” she writes, “I believed that because Penny and I were lesbians, we were second-class citizens. That is the most difficult grieving I do.”
Courageous and important but emotionally overdone.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-58005-508-6
Page Count: 224
Publisher: Seal Press
Review Posted Online: Aug. 10, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2014
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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