by Barbara J. Hopkinson ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2013
A brave, candid memoir that earnestly seeks to help readers who have also suffered loss.
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Part memoir, part self-help treatise, Hopkinson’s debut book chronicles her son’s death and the grief that nearly destroyed her own life.
Hopkinson’s memoir begins when her 21-year-old son, Brent, was killed in a motorcycle accident on the campus of his Arizona university. He had borrowed a friend’s bike, although he wasn’t trained to ride it. At a stop sign, the bike stalled and Brent accelerated to keep it in gear, unintentionally catapulting himself forward and hitting a wall behind the school’s library. Hopkinson tells the story in vivid, excruciating detail, revisiting her son’s death and the stages of mourning that gripped her in its aftermath. She opens a window into her emotional life, from the phone call in which she learns of the accident to her trip to Arizona, the decision to take him off life support, and then then the return trip to her Massachusetts home to plan his funeral. After the initial shock of Brent’s death, Hopkinson’s depression deepened. Her marriage of 30 years dissolved; she contemplated suicide. She finally found solace in what she calls spirituality, which for her involves meditating daily and seeking mediums to communicate with Brent and assure her that his spirit is still with her. The story is heartfelt and deeply touching, but it is awkwardly paired with a self-help component that makes the narrator’s voice vacillate between memoirist and educator. In her introduction, Hopkinson details Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. At the end of each chapter, she includes a “reflection” that explains the stages she went through and reads like a workbook in managing grief. Within the chapters, the narrative occasionally veers into the role of instructor, sometimes directly addressing the reader and offering advice. Sometimes, the narrative devolves into homily and explicit lessons, saying, for example, that everyone processes grief differently, a point repeated throughout the book. In mining her own suffering, though, she provides hope for other grieving parents.
A brave, candid memoir that earnestly seeks to help readers who have also suffered loss.Pub Date: April 18, 2013
ISBN: 978-1479795277
Page Count: 270
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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by Ta-Nehisi Coates ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 8, 2015
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
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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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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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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