A complex and compelling memoir requiring a slow and patient read.
In this small volume, Nawrocki (Four Blue Eggs, 2014) looks back at one year of her life—the six months she spent in a coma at age 19 and her half year in rehabilitation.
Early on, the author asks: “How can I write a memoir about events for which I have no memory?” Six months of her life were lost to a mysterious viral encephalitis that wracked her body and mind, and now she is determined to make sense of the time and the events that almost took her life. She is trying to understand the coma from the inside but has only outside information in her toolbox. She shares her journal entries from her first year at Sarah Lawrence, wondering whether these are the poetic, emotionally fraught musings of a typical freshman or the signs that some illness was already lurking, ready to take her down. She scours medical records, detailing the myriad tests and ambiguous conclusions. She knows but does not remember that she fell ill in the beginning of June. In August, the medical team at Yale New Haven Hospital wanted to do an open brain biopsy. Fortunately, her cousin Nancy, a doctor, stepped in: “Amy was a poet before she got sick, and when she gets better, I think she might need that piece of frontal lobe,” she told the team. Indeed, Nawrocki is a poet, and her writings, in her journals and in this memoir, are filled with vivid metaphors: “We all have wished to dream ourselves beyond the stratosphere, to rocket past the Oort cloud and hitch a ride on a revolving arm of the galaxy.” The basic, provocative question posed throughout this text is: what is memory? Is it the imprint on the brain of actual experiences, or the sum construct of experience, pieces learned from photographs, and the recollections of others? Nawrocki’s prose is often lyrical, but her musings are sometimes confounding, especially the passages written before her illness: “Palm strike to the face...I’m tired of this now that ebb tides the flow.” Still, this account is ultimately captivating, rewarding readers who finish the intricate book.
A complex and compelling memoir requiring a slow and patient read.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-947003-61-3
Page Count: 68
Publisher: Little Bound Books
Review Posted Online: Dec. 12, 2017
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
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
