Vivid testimony to faith and the human spirit amidst chaos and daunting change.
A Vietnamese refugee movingly recalls her life during wartime, her escape, and her sometimes bumpy adjustment to life in the US.
Nineteen when she and her family managed to get on one of the last helicopters taking off from the US Embassy roof in Saigon in 1975, Sawyer first explains how the family came to be Christian in a narrative crafted by veteran coauthor Proctor (Sally, 1990, etc.). Anh’s grandfather had been a bureaucrat employed by the French colonial government in Hanoi. Unhappy with his work and his wife, he became addicted to opium; saved by an American missionary, he converted to Christianity and dedicated his life to God. Her father, the son of a prominent landlord, became a communist and was imprisoned by the French; after the communists took over in North Vietnam, he got into trouble with the Party, and the family had to flee to Saigon. As communists advanced from the north, an elder brother who lived in America tried but failed to get them exit visas, and they joined the mob of panicked Vietnamese on the embassy grounds. In the US, religious organizations found the family homes, work, and a college for Anh in the Midwest. There she fell in love with fellow student Philip Sawyer, an aspiring fashion designer who seemed refreshingly different from everyone else. They married and moved to New York, but while Anh thrived working for an airline, Philip was unable to succeed in his chosen field and became depressed. Her religious faith wavered until they moved to Kansas, where Philip’s depression was cured by a speaker at a prayer meeting. In the late 1990s, Anh began working with Vietnamese relief groups, and she recalls a visit to Vietnam in 1998 that allowed her to come to comforting closure with her past.
Vivid testimony to faith and the human spirit amidst chaos and daunting change.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2003
ISBN: 0-446-52908-7
Page Count: 256
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2002
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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