A harrowing but ultimately inspiring remembrance with skillful prose.
A girl leaves home at 16 and eventually becomes an acclaimed singer and owner of a thriving business in this memoir.
Miller opens her debut book with a terrifying sequence in 1987, when she was a teenager: On Christmas Day, she writes, her mother brandished a 12-inch knife and threatened to kill her. Miller’s vivid writing makes the scene feel real and engaging: “She chases me from the kitchen to the living room, waving the blade and cursing as a hundred tiny lights twinkle from our tree.” That mix of frightening and beautiful imagery is on display throughout this book,which follows Miller from her days of struggling in Des Moines, Iowa, to her later success in San Francisco. After the Christmas incident, Miller was briefly homeless; she got a restaurant job but continued to keep up her schoolwork and study the violin. A music scholarship led her to Iowa State University in 1989, she writes, where she met her future husband, an architect; she dropped out but later enrolled at Des Moines’ Drake University. There, Miller began to find her voice as a singer. She moved to San Francisco, had a daughter at age 23, went to work as a graphic designer at an ad agency, and developed impressive management skills along the way. She and her husband divorced, but by then, her singing—she performed at weddings and other events in the Bay Area—had caught the attention of the likes of singer Frederica von Stade and songwriter Bobby Sharp (writer of the Ray Charles hit “Unchain My Heart”). Eventually, she recorded Sharp’s songs on her own record label and received good reviews in major newspapers. Overall, this is a memoir that begins bleakly and ends triumphantly, with Miller the head of a thriving music and special events company and making beautiful music on the side. The author takes readers along with her for the entire ride, and while she’s doing it, she not only bares her soul, but also shares useful life lessons that readers may take to heart.
A harrowing but ultimately inspiring remembrance with skillful prose.Pub Date: March 22, 2022
ISBN: 979-8985600223
Page Count: 212
Publisher: Poignant Press
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An accessible, informative journey through complex issues during turbulent times.
Immersion journalism in the form of a graphic narrative following a Syrian family on their immigration to America.
Originally published as a 22-part series in the New York Times that garnered a Pulitzer for editorial cartooning, the story of the Aldabaan family—first in exile in Jordan and then in New Haven, Connecticut—holds together well as a full-length book. Halpern and Sloan, who spent more than three years with the Aldabaans, movingly explore the family’s significant obstacles, paying special attention to teenage son Naji, whose desire for the ideal of the American dream was the strongest. While not minimizing the harshness of the repression that led them to journey to the U.S.—or the challenges they encountered after they arrived—the focus on the day-by-day adjustment of a typical teenager makes the narrative refreshingly tangible and free of political polemic. Still, the family arrived at New York’s JFK airport during extraordinarily political times: Nov. 8, 2016, the day that Donald Trump was elected. The plan had been for the entire extended family to move, but some had traveled while others awaited approval, a process that was hampered by Trump’s travel ban. The Aldabaans encountered the daunting odds that many immigrants face: find shelter and employment, become self-sustaining quickly, learn English, and adjust to a new culture and climate (Naji learned to shovel snow, which he had never seen). They also received anonymous death threats, and Naji wanted to buy a gun for protection. He asked himself, “Was this the great future you were talking about back in Jordan?” Yet with the assistance of selfless volunteers and a community of fellow immigrants, the Aldabaans persevered. The epilogue provides explanatory context and where-are-they-now accounts, and Sloan’s streamlined, uncluttered illustrations nicely complement the text, consistently emphasizing the humanity of each person.
An accessible, informative journey through complex issues during turbulent times.Pub Date: Sept. 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-30559-6
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Aug. 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2020
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
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